Sprint and Google have been very friendly recently[1], so it could just be an exclusivity thing.
What I'm more curious about is why none of Sprint's other, more recent Android phones have NFC in them- I just picked up a Photon yesterday sans NFC, and I'm led to believe that the EVO 3D and the Epic 4G Touch don't have it either. (Which is particularly weird for the E4GT, because the other Galaxy S II variants in the US actually have NFC in them. Who knows.)
[1] See the tight Google Voice/Sprint integration, the existence of the Nexus S 4G, etc.
It's pricey and often complicated to incorporate NFC at this stage. The phones that have it so far are more like experimental/reference platforms than anything else. When NFC is available on combo chips it will be everywhere, and manufacturers are just starting to commit properly now - Samsung and Acer have indicated all their future smartphones will have NFC within the last few days, BlackBerry is going the same way, and dear old Nokia could be too. Basically, it is still early days...
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Anybody knows why it only works on the Sprint Nexus S but not the one on TMobile?
Sprint and Google have been very friendly recently[1], so it could just be an exclusivity thing.
What I'm more curious about is why none of Sprint's other, more recent Android phones have NFC in them- I just picked up a Photon yesterday sans NFC, and I'm led to believe that the EVO 3D and the Epic 4G Touch don't have it either. (Which is particularly weird for the E4GT, because the other Galaxy S II variants in the US actually have NFC in them. Who knows.)
[1] See the tight Google Voice/Sprint integration, the existence of the Nexus S 4G, etc.
It's pricey and often complicated to incorporate NFC at this stage. The phones that have it so far are more like experimental/reference platforms than anything else. When NFC is available on combo chips it will be everywhere, and manufacturers are just starting to commit properly now - Samsung and Acer have indicated all their future smartphones will have NFC within the last few days, BlackBerry is going the same way, and dear old Nokia could be too. Basically, it is still early days...
Well Nokia has definitely committed to NFC early on. All their recent smartphones have NFC, and all future models will have it. There's the device list: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications...
Also their recent accessories support bluetooth pairing with NFC, with single tap.
Likewise HTC's Head of Product mentioned all HTC phones in the US as of next year will start having NFC.
Perhaps related to this bit of information from the GigaOM article (link: http://gigaom.com/2011/09/19/google-wallet-goes-live-with-nf...):
Isis, a rival NFC payment system led by AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile is also preparing to launch early next year.