Your smartphone’s NFC capabilities don’t have to be used only for payment or marketing purposes, and NFC tags can allow to create some sort of real-life short cuts to do various things by simply tapping your phone on the tag including:
- Automatically enable and configure Wi-Fi. This can be convenient if you are friend coming to your home, and they can just tap on the tag to get Wi-Fi access without the need to know the password
- Home automation – You can control items in your home, i.e. turn on/off your computer, lights, doors, etc… with a tag.
- Virtual Business Card – You can store your contact details in a tag and share your data with others quickly and easily.
More use cases can be found on “18 Creative & Useful Ways To Use NFC Tags With Your Smartphone” post on trendblog, and it can even be used as a keyfob to enter an apartment complex. You’ll need an app with your NFC enabled smarphone to program the NFC tags, popular ones are NFC Writer by Tagstand and NFC TagWriter by NXP, and no extra hardware is required. There are several tutorials on the web, here’s one of them.
The other good news is that NFC tags can be really cheap (about 50 cents), as if you buy 10 pieces with nice graphics on Tinydeals for $4.99 or even cheaper for $3.34 on Aliexpress with key rings, although it’s unclear if they have 5 only, or 10.
Thanks to onebir for the idea.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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