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NFC hardware in the battery???

J

jroc

Android Expert
I read this in another thread:

http://androidforums.com/samsung-galaxy-nexus/452466-noisy-sparkly-screen.html

Didnt want to derail that thread but I wanted to post a lil rant...

Galaxy Nexus: my quick take | The Verge Forums

I just read that link..NFC hardware is in the battery??? Ok...so if you get an extended battery you have to see if it has the hardware too, get them all from Samsung, or just be without that feature?

I swear these manufactures do these things on purpose...they couldnt put the NFC hardware no where else but in the battery....why not do like they did with the Nexus S?? HTC putting antennas on the battery cover....Moto doing non removable batteries now...some phones have no sd cards..wtf is going on???

It seems like the more popular Android gets, the more backwards the phone manufactures get. Yea...there are pros n cons to no sd card and non removable batteries....but antennas on the battery cover? Is the pro for that a better signal? If so, the con to me is I can actually take my antenna off if I ever got mad at it...

EDIT: ok....MAYBE having NFC hardware in the battery means you can take it with you, like a Sim card? I'm just trying to find the logic in putting it in the battery...even in that case, you would have to keep the same phone for a good while.

I dont know if this really belongs here, reading about the G Nex and NFC is what started all this. So if mods think it belongs elsewhere, so be it.
 
Having NFC in the battery might mean other phone manufacturer's can integrate NFC into their "older" phones. That would be great for the beam feature!
 
Ok...backwards compatibility. lol. Thats a plus. I dont know...you know how you see something that upsets you and all you see is red...lol.

So that would mean battery manufactures would have to start putting it in their batteries. Now that I think about it...it would be easier to get NFC out the gate, adopted more.

I guess it doesnt really make a difference cuz only a few phone have NFC right now, in the US anyway. Either way you are tied to specific hardware of you want that feature.
 
In all likelihood, NFC isn't really in the battery.

The little RFID antenna is in the battery. That's all. The actual NFC guts - the programmable chip - is on the circuit board, so no, you won't be able to slap a NFC battery in any old phone and use it with Beam.

The issue is that you couldn't put the NFC antenna behind the battery and expect it to be effective - and the battery takes up the majority of the back of the phone. So they put the antenna on the battery.

So... no, it's not backwards compatible and no, you can't take it with you. Well, you can sort of take it with you, but there's nothing to "take" - it's just a little antenna. Fortunately, because it's only an antenna, it's cheap, so it shouldn't significantly change the price of the battery.

This is all really speculation until we get something like an iFixit teardown of the phone, but it's almost guaranteed that they didn't put any chips on the battery, and it's just the antenna sitting on there.
 
The antenna may be in the battery, but I agree that the actual part that communicates with the phone has to be on the circuit board.
 
I wanna comment about HTC putting the antenna on the battery door I mentioned above.

That might be the best thing to do to help with reception. I have a Rezound now...and so far it gets 4G on my floor at work, something my RAZR hasnt done yet. And it did it easy. I'm assuming he antenna on the battery door helps.

So....in the future...I might be looking for HTC phone with antennas on the battery door. Of all this things I used to knock HTC for...that is one thing I feel they got right.
 
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