NFC has come a long way over time and nowadays simply seems to be everywhere. The more products we pick up, the more we are starting to hear about ‘NFC included’. Most of these products do make sense and kinda seem to fill in. That said, some products, on the face of it, seem like they do not need NFC at all and it being there seems to be a waste of time. And then there are the others. Ones, where once you see NFC included, you simply have to say ‘Where have you been all my life’. Today is one of those days and a product just announced by Toshiba is one of those products.
Toshiba were in attendance at CES and as part of the proceedings they announced one of their new products, This is without a doubt a much-needed product, even if you did not know beforehand that you needed it. Toshiba today launched an SDHC Memory Card with Built-in NFC. At first that may not sound like quite the groundbreaking or ingenious product that it is, but sometimes the most simplest products are the best. In short, the SD Card contains its own NFC chip. This means you can literally see what’s on the Memory Card without even installing or inserting it. You simply hover an android smartphone (with NFC capabilities of course) over the memory card and you can check through the files. To take advantage of the NFC ability you do need to download a companion app (which presumably is the viewer for the SD card) but that is it. No longer will you need to sort through a pile of SD Cards by checking each one to find the one you are looking for. Not to mention that you can quite easily check how much storage is available on the card, again without having to insert. All-in-all, quite a clever product.
Want one? Well, the chips are not yet available. Although, according to the press release (source link below) you won’t have to wait too long as they are due to become available next month. The NFC Cards will be available in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB variants. Unfortunately, Toshiba has not provided any details on the pricing of the units which is a shame. If the pricing of these units are reasonably, then this could be a real good seller. What do you think of them? Like the idea of an NFC-enabled SD card? Let us know.
