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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

I find it amusing how Google went an extra mile to kill IrDA on Android, to push own Google Beam.

I remember at around the age of first OHA phones, Japanese all had IrDA ports, but google has persistently stonewalled IrDA inclusion into Android mainline.

Sharing things were super easy on my Ericsson r520: press menu, and press 5 — contact shared in just 1 second.

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Old samsung phone had IrDA. Was great for downloading the app required to turn down the volume of the TV at the club...

My Samsung Galaxy S5 has IrDA. Never actually used it yet though.

No your S5 doesn't have IrDA. It has an IR blaster (e.g. just an IR LED) but no receiver so it can't transfer data over it.

That's not IrDA though - that was just an IR blaster that could send out an IR signal to TVs and whatnot.

OP probably talks about the horribly slow and finnicky data transfer standard used on pre-earlier phones before Bluetooth was widely available and cheap.

I stand corrected! Thank you.

my HP48 GX calculator had a IR port, and there was an app that could use it as a TV remote transmitter. Install the correct tv brand "driver" and off you went. Worked great.

Also, one project I did at a hackaton was a tv remote app with a couple IR leds connected to the original iPhone headphone jack and a webpage (no native apps at that point) that generated the correct signal in the form of a .WAV file for audio playback. Didn't win but that later landed me an interview at a top company.

Palm OS 4 and under devices had IR ports and IrDA for 1990s AirDrop. Then someone figured out how to use that IrDA port for IR blasting.

I think IrDA has been removed from the Linux kernel these days because nobody was around to maintain it.

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