Those NFC chips that you’ve seen baked into the latest raft of BlackBerry phones? Turns out RIM had more in mind that just future-proofing its latest range for mobile payments.
BlackBerry Tag, announced today at GITEX in Dubai, is the best use of NFC in smartphones we’ve heard of since Google Wallet.
With BlackBerry Tag, RIM is promsing that you’ll be able to tap two Tag-enabled phones together to do things like sharing documents, contact information and ‘multimedia content’. The days of Bluetoothing tinny, low-bitrate UK Garage MP3s to mates are well and truly over.
“BlackBerry Tag is an exciting and innovative feature that makes sharing contact information and multimedia content effortless and seamless,” said RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie during his keynote speech. “BlackBerry Tag opens a new dimension to the BlackBerry platform that is powerful, simple and intuitive and we think it will be welcomed by both users and developers.”
As well as allowing for quick transfer or work documents and music files, you’ll also apparently be able to add contacts to BBM and initiate conversations just by tapping two BlackBerries together.
It all sounds pretty Bump-a-licious to us, and a little similar to what DoubleTwist’s DoubleTap feature brings to NFC’ed Android phones.
The beauty of BlackBerry Tag however is that most of the current BlackBerry range – including the Bold 9900 and BlackBerry Curve 9360 – will be able to make use of this.
BlackBerry Tag is due to be rolled out in the next update to BlackBerry OS 7. RIM also announced that APIs will be released to developers; hopefully we can see Bump-style “tap to share” apps hitting BlackBerry App World soon.
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