
One of the new features built into Gingerbread is something called NFC (Near Field Communication). While many of believed this would allow your phone to transmit information to other devices, transforming it into a mobile payment machine, this is not the case. The NFC does only one way transmission and appears to function along the same lines as the bar code reader.
We first discovered this yesterday by way of page 333 of Google’s own Gingerbread manual, which happens to mention that the NFC support built into Gingerbread basically allows phones to function as readers, but not as transmitters. Therefore, NFC-enabled Android devices will be able to scan NFC tags, or transmitters, but will not be able to transmit information themselves. In English, that means your shiny new Nexus S won’t be able to act as a credit card due to the fact that it can’t transmit information for NFC readers (potentially ones such as cash registers) to pick up on.
Check out the video below of the Nexus S NFC Demo:
[video=youtube;0KwbM9YVW3Y]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KwbM9YVW3Y[/video]
For all discussions on the Nexus S, be sure to visit: Nexus S Forum - Nexus One Forum - Google Phone Forum
Source: AndroidPolice.com