After weeks of anticipation, Apple officially unveiled the iPhone 4S at its most recent media event, which also brought the latest operating system, the iOS 5 update, into the light.
Though the device wasn’t the iPhone 5, as was the expectation from the majority of experts and analysts in the industry, the iOS brought over 200 new features to this latest release. The iPhone 4S includes Siri voice-activated controls, iCloud content sync service, and can be location-enabled for the Find My Friends tracking app. However, what shocked many was the lack of near field communication integration for mobile payments.
One of the main expectations for iOS, for quite some time, has been that it would be a shoe-in for the first NFC feature for an iPhone device. These predictions were not unfounded. In August 2010, Apple had hired Benjamin Vigier, a top NFC vet, which followed closely after a number of patent filings that were related to NFC.
This, beyond the fact that its primary competition, Google, has already introduced integration with NFC in its Android 2.3 operating system version. Rumors and speculations have abounded about the ability of Apple to plunge far ahead of its rivals with NFC and contactless mobile payments. A buzz had built from insiders staying that a remote computing solution using NFC enabled iPhones was going to let users wave their devices at any compatible Mac to load all of their personal data, settings, and apps from the phone to the computer.
The lack of incorporation of NFC into Apples newly released iPhone 4S will raise doubts. The main question is whether those doubts will be in Apple products or NFC technology.