Security a Concern As Near Field Communications Becomes More Common in Smartphones

Windows 8 tablets will initially be positioned as premium devices, said Jeff Orr, group director of consumer research for ABI Research, on the company’s webcast on connected devices Thursday. “They won’t necessarily be as affordable as media tablets today,” he said, because they'll most likely build in data and application capability for communication between Windows 8 devices in the enterprise world along with feature sets and functionality that will cater more to business and productivity, Orr said. The tablet market will continue to segment as different needs emerge for mobile technology, Orr said, saying consumers won’t likely be the driving audience for the needs, but will play into the mix as Windows users look to transfer functionality to tablets.

Meanwhile, near field communications (NFC) in smartphones will make mobile devices more personal, but security concerns will become an issue as more phones enable the technology, said Kevin Burden, ABI vice president-mobile. Once a user enables NFC and puts in credit card information there will be a “heightened sense” to protect phones more than they do now, he said. Burden referred to a “chicken-and-egg” scenario, where more NFC devices will have to be available to consumers at retail before phone makers turn on the feature in smartphones. It took a decade for VeriFone to “get out there,” Burden said, referring to the electronic payment company behind debit cards terminals and now NFC and mobile wallets. Although he envisions NFC gaining traction faster, “there has to be a large base of users out there” for phone companies to embrace it, he said. “There’s a lot of NFC going into mobile phones right now,” he said, “but there are very few actually turned on or used.” NFC doesn’t add a lot to the bill of materials for a mobile device, he said, “and it’s soon going to become an expected part.” Apple’s adoption of NFC would go far toward pushing out the technology, but when the company will get into the game “is difficult to pinpoint,” he said. “Eventually they will,” he said.

The wide range of device choices in the connected device market -- including mobile phones, smart TVs and other connected devices in the home -- are driving the use of “snack-size” applications that are “bursty” in nature, Orr noted. Consumption of these “bites” of information tends to involve short sessions such as answering quick questions, checking email, typing quick replies, sending instant messages or participating in a social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. Productivity and creativity applications that require more processing power and input “remain the domain of the PC for now, and we don’t see PCs themselves going away,” he said. But PCs increasingly “won’t be exclusive for all computing applications,” he said. Access to data will increasingly “have to support multiple distinct device types.”

Cloud services will bridge the connected home and mobile device worlds, Orr said. Data synchronization and backup may be the starting point, leading to the ability to push updates to all of the connected devices via the cloud, he said. “As you move from mobile to fixed-based access to content, it all remains the same,” he said. Users won’t have to think about how, or if, an application works, he said. “It just does.”