Recently I purchased a Samsung Galaxy S III, and so far it’s a pretty good phone. The picture and video capabilities are outstanding, the signal strength and bloatware are annoying.
One thing that I have started to play around with are the NFC capabilities. NFC, or Near Field Communications, allows mobile phones to talk to one another, or read unpowered NFC “tags”. My interest lies in the ability to program and read tags.
To get started, purchased some TecTiles directly from Samsung and then installed the TecTile app from Google Play. Once I started using the app, it became apparent how limited it really is. Reading the reviews showed that many people felt the same way. In those reviews, someone recommended using NFC Task Launcher which I downloaded next.
Much better! Instead of a small set of applications to launch, NFC Task Launcher allows the use to launch any application installed. Something that also makes this app very powerful are switches. This allows one tag to toggle two different tasks. For example, lets say that you’ve created a task that turns the media volume down to zero and another task that turns the volume to max. With a switch, both tasks are programmed into one tag and each time the phone is tapped on it, it toggles between the two apps.
In the app, there are a few suggestions where to buy tags:
Tagstand has a hobbyist starter kit and has 15 tags and stickers for the same price as 5 of the TecTiles. Had I known that, I would have purchased from Tagstand instead!