This does it, really. If the nine reasons we gave you on Monday weren’t enough to dissuade you from buying the new iPhone 5 (yeah, that’s what we’re calling it for now), here are two more – and big ones too.
Despite what has been rumoured for a while now, Apple’s newest smartphone is unlikely to support NFC, or near-field communication technology, which would have enabled a seamless tap-and-transfer of data and contactless transactions.
Yes, yes we know – previous leaks and rumours had indeed suggested that Apple would be introducing an NFC chip in its new iPhone 5, but the latest bunch of leaked images of the new iPhone 5 have paid put to those expectations.
With the introduction of Apple’s new ‘Passbook’ payment solution with iOS 6, NFC would have made perfect sense but looking at Apple and their incremental iPhone updates, it may be too big an update in too short an amount of time, says tech enthusiast Sonny Dickson, who describes himself as a 'verified' iOS hacker on Twitter.
Additionally, Apple Inc will know if its $365 million bid to acquire AuthenTec (a firm specialising in fingerprint scanning) is successful only on October 4, 2012, weeks after its new iPhone 5 is unveiled tomorrow. No way it can then have the technology already incorporated in the smartphone.
That both these technologies will feature in later iPhone (and iPad) models is almost a given – but the fact that the impending iteration of Apple’s smartphone will not have these is a marked letdown. The NFC, incidentally, has been available in a number of smartphones including its arch-rival Samsung Galaxy S3 (as also the S2 and a number of other Samsung models), and many more of BlackBerry, Google, HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Prada, Porsche, Panasonic, Sharp and Sony smartphone models, among others.
For Apple to not have NFC in its latest smartphone is a bit of a shame, really.
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