After several years of covering video games and technology online, one thing that we have noticed is that the more highly anticipated particular game or product is, the more intense the rumors swirling about those products get. Case in point is Grand Theft Auto 5 which is one of the most heavily anticipated video games on the market currently. There are many rumors about it because its publisher Rockstar Games has been deliberately silent about any in-depth details about the game. This has resulted in a free promotions bonanza for the game as the game’s fans and industry observers really fanned the marketing flames of that particular title as they let their imagination run wile regarding particular features and also particular game directions. The same could be said about hardware technology.
You have to look no further than the iPhone as to how wild rumors can get regarding a heavily anticipated product. The cyclical releases and roll outs of upcoming iPhone models have proven to be quite a boon to rumor mongers. Many of these take the form of wishful thinking. As awesome as the iPhone is, it is the focal point of many fans’ wishes for future features. Whether it is 4G support or holographic keyboard and all sorts of other techno wizardry, you are bound to run into rumors that hype up a particular fanciful technology that either exists already or in its infancy either people want technology incorporated into the new hardware or they want a technology created for it. There is one particular rumor circulating about the iPhone 5 that is quite interesting on many levels, not least of which is its impact on point of sale transactions. According to some reports online, there was a code that was supposedly taken from the engineering verification testing version of prototypes for iPhone 5 that gives some followers of Apple reason to think that the next version of the iPhone will have NFC chips. Accordingly, it would also ship with an antenna. If this is true, this would truly take Apple to the next level when it comes to mobile commerce. It would be easier to pay for purchases using your phone.
Why the big deal about NFC?
Some observers think that NFC is the “next big thing” because it allows consumers to pay with their mobile phones just by swiping their phone past a reader that is equipped to read NFC devices. Just like a grocery checker would scan stuff that you buy from a store, an NFC reader could do the same to your phone for your purchases. While this is enough to get many people excited, the implications of the technology actually go much deeper than that. NFC could function a little bit like bluetooth where iPhone users can share and trade files using different devices. For example, if somebody has a laptop that has NFC enabled, you can swap files with that laptop. At the very least, such a feature would really cut down on the need for iTunes synchronization. Many of the suspicions for NFC integration were raised by Apple’s recent launch of the Passbook feature. This feature, which is to be included in iOS 6, the operating system that will presumably run the next iPhone as well as the current iPhone, would let people store digital versions of boarding passes, tickets, receipts and other key data that you get from merchants. Critics of the NFC rumor would point to the fact that Passbook is just a data repository, but given its functionalities, it probably just takes a minor tweak or two for it to be turned into a file swapping and e-commerce information storage feature that works well with NFC. As with previous iPhone rumors, the only antidote to the frequent mania people get about an upcoming apple product is the same–let us just wait for the release.