The folks at the official Android Developers blog have just announced Android 2.3.3 – another incremental update to Gingerbread. This update opens up the NFC chip’s full read/write capabilities for developers and users to take advantage of it for their apps.
Before, developers had to develop work-arounds if they wanted to overwrite a tag with new information, but the latest version of the SDK means they can throw that code away. Here are some of the features:
- A comprehensive NFC reader/writer API that lets apps read and write to almost any standard NFC tag in use today.
- Advanced Intent dispatching that gives apps more control over how/when they are launched when an NFC tag comes into range.
- Some limited support for peer-to-peer connection with other NFC devices.
For developers, the new version can be found in the SDK manager, and users probably shouldn’t expect this update on their Nexus S right away. More information here.
