Nokia releases new 6131 NFC phone

January 8, 2007: Nokia has brought out the details about their latest technology packed in an already familiar clamshell phone. The Nokia 6131 NFC is the first phone to enable Java developers to write MIDlets that can access functions according to the NFC Forum's specifications.

From the article:

"With Nokia 6131 NFC phone you can have your credit card, travel card and loyalty card in your phone and use it as a multi-purpose smart card. Use the Nokia 6131 NFC to pay for your purchases with speed and ease or access any mobile services, e.g. weather forecast and the latest news just by touching a tag."

NFC-aware MIDlets

In conjunction with the JSR 257 Reference Implementation, a developer is able to write NFC-aware MIDlets that need only be written once for the Java platform. With the Nokia 3220, developing NFC MIDlets had to be facilitated by the Nokia SDK for Payment and Ticketing. Hence, these MIDlets were only usable on a Nokia 3220 that had the special NFC Shell for Payment and Ticketing on them.

In theory, a MIDlet can be written that will communicate flawlessly with future NFC devices - even if these come from different brands or manufacturers. Because the JSR 257 implementation on this phone adheres to the official NFC Forum specifications, any device that has a similar implementation will be compatible with this phone, and vice versa.

Features

The Nokia 6131 NFC has some nifty features that will make the developer's life much easier. Whereas the Nokia 3220 had to be fed MIDlets using either a slow serial data cable, or an even slower GPRS connection, the 6131 NFC has Bluetooth available which allows MIDlets to be translated to the phone without any wires in-between.

The maximum JAR size is 1MB, which means that developers will have more room for shiny images and the like. This is a major improvement on the Nokia 3220's JAR size limit of a mere 128KiB. But you might even eliminate the need to add large PNG images to your JAR file completely, because the 6131 NFC also supports JSR-226, the Scalable 2D Vector Graphics API.

SVG format

This means that you can add images to your MIDlet in the SVG format. These images do not consist of mere pixels, but of vectors that will be automatically scaled to fit your screen. Hence, you won't have to worry about the screen size of the intended device. Which is a good thing, since some VGA phones with a whopping 640x480 resolution can already do MIDlets!

Web services

And if you're planning to do some serious service interaction with the 6131 NFC, you have the Web Services API (JSR-172) at your disposal. This means that you can simply use an existing Web Services Definition File (WSDL) to automatically generate a stub MIDlet! All you have to do is add images, change strings, customize things to your liking. The functional part as a whole has been dynamically generated from the WSDL file you supplied to the wscompile tool.

Your WSDL file has to be WS-I compliant, though. This means that it does not include some of the more complex types such as DateTime and the like.

Availability

The Nokia 6131 NFC is expected to be shipped in the first quarter of 2007.

Source:

• http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/6131_NFC