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Comment by robbiet480 | Hacker News Reader

Great, this sounds like Apple is going to compete with NFC.... you know, a real standard. Like FaceTime, oh wait, like iMessage, oh wait, like AirDrop, oh wait.

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Bluetooth LE is in fact a standard, and is in fact much more widely deployed than NFC. Android already has support for it as of 4.3:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy#LE_compati...

Apple is making a bet on NFC like they did on Blu-Ray. Nothing has proven that NFC is going to change the world one device at a time yet, just ike so many computers still don't come with Blu-Ray drives. Besides, every iPhone and iPad currently for sale support BTLE, whereas there are only a handful of devices that come with an NFC chip. Why wouldn't Apple leverage a technology that all of their current devices support?

I agree with most of your argument, but almost every Android phone for the last 3 years has had NFC installed - so I'll bet the installed userbase is actually more than for Apple's Bluetooth LE.

And every Android phone has had BLE hardware, but no software because Google dragged their feet until this summer. The install base of BLE is far larger than NFC.

This is Bluetooth LE, which is a standard.

Apple only said they will make FaceTime an open standard and then didn’t do it.

While laughing at them or being angry at them for that is exactly right and good it’s also important to otherwise still be truthful.

Apple never made similar claims about iMessage and AirDrop. Those two are explicitly proprietary. iMessage most certainly is a resounding success, by the way.

There are some licensing and patent issues around FaceTime it seems. Apple shouldn't have so publicly promised that they'll open it up in all reality.

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