NFC is an area that so far Windows Phone and Android are beating Apple at. In fact, the iPhone doesn’t even support NFC. While some NFC features are still limited on Windows Phone, it’s a nice feature to have in a variety of scenarios. Automatically pairing your phone to your speaker is one example that’s always demonstrated, but NFC can do so much more. Here’s an NFC app for Windows Phone that’s pretty unique. It’s called NFC Toolkit and we’re going to check it out.
NFC Toolkit comes from the developer behind TweeCoMinder, an app we’ve covered before and enjoy using. NFC Toolkit isn’t exactly a fun app for social media, instead it’s aimed solving some problems that you might face on a daily basis. This isn’t another app that just reads and writes tags, instead NFC Toolkit introduces profiles for Windows Phone.
What’s a profile? Profiles are capable of opening various setting pages in a row. This makes doing relatively common functions on your Windows Phone device a lot easier. Profiles basically consist of two variables – situation and settings you want to carry out. For example, you might walk into your office and wish to disable your cellular data connection, but turn on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. You can place an NFC tag near your desk that helps you do those actions quickly in a row.
As of right now, only settings pages can be added into a profile. As the Windows Phone platform matures and adds more NFC-friendly features you can be sure that NFC Toolkit will take advantage of them.
NFC Toolkit will let you create various profiles and write them to NFC tags. Of course you can read and write other things to NFC tags like launching a specific app or website.
NFC can be a somewhat intimating corner of technology if you’re not too familiar with it. Thankfully, NFC Toolkit is user friendly and offers an interface that is easy and fast to navigate. There are little guides and instructions everywhere throughout the app to ensure that you don’t get lost or confused about a particular function.
If you have a handful of NFC tags laying around and want to interact with them you should check out NFC Toolkit. The app costs $1.49, but includes a free trial that allows users to fully test it for 10 days.
The developer is open to user feedback and will take the app in directions that are requested. So don’t hesitate to contact him through the about page in the app.
Want NFC Toolkit for Windows Phone 8? Grab it from the Windows Phone Store, use the QR code, or swipe to the right in our app.
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