NFC on the new iPhone? Unlikely.
Remember those rumours of NFC coming to the new iPhone? Well, finally, they’ve been shot down by Jim Darlymple in response to a post by Anand Shimpi:
“Given the primarily metal backside of the new iPhone, it’s highly unlikely that NFC is in the cards for this generation. In fact, given the very little space at top and bottom dedicated to those glass RF windows, you can almost entirely rule it out.
NFC operates on the 13.56MHz ISM band, which has a relatively large wavelength, at 22.1 m. Making a traditional dipole antenna that radiates at all given the constraints of a smartphone package is thus a big challenge, considering that smartphones are maybe 5-inches tall at maximum, to say nothing of the supposed upcoming iPhone’s longest linear dimension.”
Darlymple often gets directives from Apple, which seem to aim to temper expectations for upcoming products without an official announcement. The post in response to an iPhone parts leak from yesterday in which a mystery chip was speculated to carry NFC.
[via 9to5mac]
