MIFARE DESFire comes to mind as one of the more popular cards with encryption, though I do recall there's others as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE#MIFARE_DESFire
And as for it being unreliable: [citation needed]. I've never had problems sending data to another NFC-enabled device. The only time I've ever had it not work was back when phones with non-NXP chipsets first started to appear on the market, and some folks were still selling standalone tags that used NXP's older proprietary format (MIFARE Classic) rather than the standardized format (NFC Forum). That's rarely a problem these days.
The lower level stuff and NDEF format is well standardized. The higher level operations are not nearly as well standardised right now, even more so when you're dealing with large files, which will require a handoff to Bluetooth or WiFi Direct.
In NFC's defense, it's only recently (4.2, Jelly Bean) that Android even supported transferring large files via Bluetooth handoff, so hopefully that stuff will improve with time.
I've personally never had it work. I tried twice with different two phones (Motorola and Samsung) and while it did recognize it was supposed to do something NFC-esque, the data never transferred. At that point I gave up and just swapped SD-cards and manually copied the data over.
Just my experience but I'm not interested in trying again when there are other methods that I know will transfer data guaranteed to work.
On the flip side, adding the extra hardware to a tag to support encryption has a non-trivial cost. (NFC tags are limited by both storage space and power.) If you're doing mass production of tags, that cost adds up very quickly.
For gaming - imagine a game console with mix-and-match one-handed controllers. Trackballs, joysticks, pointers, keyboards, mice, etc. Bump them together to tell the console "I'm using the whamblefloog with the xorchball" so it can tie each disparate controller to the concept of a two-handed player.
I would be willing to bet, in the eternal rotation of the IT wheel, that the next revolution will be something very much like IRDA in your google glass glasses.
Of course it'll be hampered by incompatibility, relatively low uptake, unreliable software, insecurity, probably only supported by certain platforms, and probably an awful and difficult to use UI, so it'll die out. To be replaced by more or less identical short range RF "solution" (and guess how that will turn out?)
There's no reason short range IR or RF can't work at the hardware level. No reason a unified, generic, stable standard can't exist. Other than the whole, lack of need thing.
Look how well bluetooth and wifi work using basically the same technology... because they solved actual problems.
They (were?) using a patented algorithm working on accelerometer signals to figure out which devices were being "bumped" together server-side.
I think the reason it hasn't caught on here is because municipalities, malls, theme parks, etc., haven't embraced the technology, so there's no need for it to be in our phones.
The top search results for "nfc asia" and "nfc hong kong" mainly return press releases and news articles about how NFC is being rolled out. In fact, most of the ones I found are as recent as July and August.
There was one older story from April 2011 talking about "hundreds of field trials" but no follow-on detail.
I'm not doubting that certain markets in major Asian cities have seen NFC rollouts. But I question a) the scale and b) the public reception. Indeed, since smart phones are still catching on in major markets in many Asian markets I am doubtful of how wide-spread NFC adoption actually can be.
I'd love to see some specific stories that refute my point of view.
The strength of phone NFC seems to be that it's basically a "smart card on your phone," and smart cards as a payment method are extremely common in places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc., largely driven by their ubiquity in the form of mass-transit cards (Suica, Pasmo, Octopus, etc).
Far more people have smart cards than have smartphones in these places, and so offering smart-card-compatible NFC functionality on phones seems a no-brainer.
The result of this is that NFC-on-your-phone has worked for ages in Japan, on all types of phone ("smart" and otherwise, except the iphone), and as it uses a widespread existing infrastructure, there's no real issue with availability.
In other words, NFC is not something that's dependent on smartphone popularity for success; rather smartphones with NFC are simply trying to take advantage of an existing successful system to become more popular.
As for the question "do people use it?" I can't refer you to any "stories" but I can say that I personally see lots of people paying for stuff with their phone.... [The main issue with smartphones seems to be that the iphone doesn't support NFC, and lots of people have iphones...]
Purely anecdotal, granted, but you asked for stories.
(Personally, I use an iPhone with a Pasmo NFC card duct-taped to the back of it.)
But all kinds of phones have NFC and can be used for trains and buying stuff.
Train stations in mainland China use something similar, though I'm basing this only my experience with one city, but a big one at that (Guangzhou).
Part of the reason why you aren't finding more accounts of successful NFC rollouts in Asia might be because you aren't searching in the local languages.
For a technology that's supposed to make sharing data so quick and easy, it seems like a really bad sign that I have not been able to make it work even once, despite sitting there fiddling with it for probably 20 minutes. It's like someone looked at the extremely painful and ill-defined bluetooth pairing user experience and said, "yeah, that's a good starting point, but let's make it a little more frustrating."
Apple and the US market aren't the entire universe. NFC is already used in other countries for secure communication (payments, ID, etc), but that's not even one of the most interesting aspects of it.
I will stick to Bump, since that's the subject of the topic: when I checked a couple of years ago, their way of connecting two devices was primitive and rather insecure, it was essentially a heuristic that used several parameters to guess which two users "bumped". NFC would have solved the problem perfectly, with no network communication needed and 100% user-to-user match rate.
Are iPod Socks really considered a failed product?
[1] http://www.interac.ca/en/interac-flash/interac-flash-for-con...
1) It's a technology, not a feature. Many companies, mostly Android handset makers but also Blackberry and Nokia, have included it in their devices as "yet another selling point". It was included not as a way to make a better device or experience for customers, but as a gimmick for upselling handsets.
2) It's insecure. Holy hell, Batman. Just spend a couple minutes reading through the security section of the NFC Wikipedia entry. It's insanely easy to read transactions remotely, modify data, and jam signals. Even more, there is no hint of security built into the technology. None. No RF signal modification detection, no encryption.
3) Unreliable. While it sounds like a good idea on paper, for the most part it just doesn't work very well in practice. There's too many subpar implementations in too many devices. Just because you have a good one in your handset doesn't help when most of the limited ones available in public are cheap.
There's a damn good reason Apple hasn't included NFC. It's broken. They definitely put out crappy products from time to time (don't forget Ping, iPod socks, Maps, Siri, MobileMe, and about 300 variations of the Mac before Jobs came back). But NFC hasn't proven to be something useful or valuable. They won't include it. Perhaps something like it in the future, but never NFC in its current form.