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Comment by 0xfaded | Hacker News Reader

Waaay back when in Japan, sekigaisen (infrared) was a verb meaning to transfer contact details or photos or whatever between phones via infrared. It was amazing how fast the iPhone took over Japan and killed off their quirky phone ecosystem.

Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous. Every phone has it

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yes, "beaming" in the us was also used for quite a while. as in IR beam

japanese phones were buggy, feature packed monstrosities. a bunch of companies fighting to check as many boxes as they could. it's not a surprise that they got wiped out by an attempt to make a holistic internet communicator.

but for a while, there was nothing like them and their ability to get information on the internet

I wonder if this was driven by the Palm Pilots in the early 2000s. We beamed contacts, calendar entries, whole apps via IR. At trade shows exhibitors had terminals that would constantly send out contact informations via OBEX (?).

In the US (edit: and elsewhere!), "beaming" worked great between Apple Newton devices, including the pretty cool eMate 300 (an early Jony Ive creation, I just found on Wikipedia).

In 1993.

Microsoft Zune had the ability to send music wirelessly to other Zunes, it was called squirting

That's appalling. "Yo let me squirt you"

Somehow "squirting their users" perfectly defines Microsoft to this day

squirt me bro

My friends in school would send ringtones, wallpapers, and other small files through Bluetooth. It normally worked pretty well no matter the device.

I remember being blown away by the Gameboy Colour IR link. You could use it to trade Pokemon. That makes a bit more sense now if sekigaisen was already a popular ecosystem.

And in Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal on GameBoy Color you could send Mystery gifts via IR!

Someone even ported it to an emulator! https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art11.html

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