Birds of a feather stick together and so it should come as no surprise that Finnish phone maker Nokia has recruited compatriots Rovio – makers of the infamous Angry Birds – to help it out when it comes to enabling near-field communications (NFC) for Symbian devices.
Nokia has had a tough time in terms of software, so as the mobile world abounds with chatter on the potential for near-field communications capability, it’s no wonder the firm has called in the Mighty Eagle itself to help it catch up with its competitors.
Rovio is currently working on an NFC-enabled version of its hit game, called Angry Birds Magic, adding 20 new levels of addiction for fans.
Apparently only five of these new levels will be open from the beginning, and in order to unlock the rest, users will have to find other players with NFC capable phones, tap the devices together and acquire the rest.
“We’re going to use the power of our brand to maybe bring NFC to a wider user base so people realize what the technology is,” Matthew Wilson, a marketing manager at Rovio told Bloomberg. “It’s not going to be highly profitable at first but it’s something we’d like to be involved in.”
The plan certainly seems to have Nokia’s hopes soaring, and the firm plans to start upgrading its Symbian software in order to add NFC functionality to the C7 smartphone – otherwise known as the Astound to T-Mobile USA customers. The updated NFC capable version of Symbian will reportedly be dubbed Symbian Anna.
“The C7 is just the beginning,” Sixten Sandstroem, a Nokia manager responsible for NFC business partnerships told Bloomberg adding, “we will partner with trusted service managers, credit cards, everyone.”
Betting on NFC to keep Symbian afloat for a while longer may be a smart move for Nokia which still hopes to shift another 150 million Symbian OS phones over the next year. Indeed, it isn’t the first time the firm has dabbled with the tech, having worked on it as far back as 2004, even managing to produce a handset enabled with it.
But despite the fact Nokia’s rivals are already rushing to add NFC to their upcoming smart devices, some analysts doubt whether the rather costly technology is worth it for the Finnish firm at this stage. A CCS Insight report back in February put the cost of NFC hardware at around $5 a handset, no small change to a company trying to move from Symbian to Windows 7 in the future.
Nokia won’t say whether NFC will be included in upcoming Windows Phone 7 handsets, due out in volume in 2012. Perhaps it will all depend on the continuing success of Angry Birds and whether NFC will have become a standard and user requested feature by then.
