What and Why is a S Beam.

What? Can u send a picture from a mobile to  mobile just by holding them back to back.No authentication like blue tooth. oh come on, how?

Its possible in the phones having NFC(Near field communication). So, what NFC, a new story? Lets get clear what is a NFC,

Near field communication, is a standard for very short-range radio transmission. How short are we talking about? A pair of NFC transmitters can communicate at a maximum of just a few centimetres. that's what we have in our latest mobile phones.

Concept behind is inductive coupling. Here is a super example from HowStuffWorks, take 2 copper wires. Pass current to one copper wire, connect the another copper wire to voltmeter(instrument to measure voltage travelling in circuit). When electrons flows in a conductor, it produces magnetic field. When you move the first wire near the second wire, magnetic field from first wire will pass to the second and the second wire will also produces a magnetic field.

This happens with our RFID tags. Our RFID tags will have a circuit which stores a KB data. RFID reader will have a powered circuit which produces magnetic filed. When we take our Tag closer, will get induced by the magnetic field from RFID reader. RFID tag will also generates magnetic field back, the reader reads the magnetic field produced by the reader and translates the data for us. This happens so fast, we experience it daily.

What's happening in NFC?

 It's possible to incorporate an NFC tag inside a poster. So, if you see an ad for something that interests you, you can hold up your smart phone with an NFC chip up to it and receive more information. How does it happened?

The NFC Chip in the poster is just like a RFID tag. Your phone will have a circuit to produce magnetic field. Once phone nears the poster, magnetic field flown on the poster and produces a different magnetic field back. The reader in your phone, reads the magnetic filed (i.e) data from the poster.

ho you feel great. But, have you forgot about S Beam?

Before reading S Beam, we have a pending one. Types of NFC.

There are 2 types of NFC,

1. Passive NFC
2. Active NFC.

Passive NFC -  A circuit card  that you must place near a reader to activate, which is not powered. E.g: NFC Chips on posters. A powered reader should be used to read data from the poster.

Active NFC - Here both the reader and chip will be powered. Lets have 2 devices A & B. A want to read from B. When A nears to B, magnetic field from A activates B. The B generated its own magnetic field, A reads it. This is what happening in S Beam. S Beam:S beam is the samsung extension of  Android Beam (a feature of the Android mobile operating system to allow data to be transferred via near field communication). 

S Beam uses Active Near field communication mode, which we discussed earlier.

An active NFC can only communicate with one target device at a time -- you can't broadcast a message to multiple devices over NFC. The active device will send information to the target and will only accept a response from that target. Other NFC devices will ignore the communication.

Which is best?

In terms of Speed: Blue tooth is good, since its transfer speed is 2.1mbps but NFC is 424kbps.Power consumption: NFC Consumes less power than blue tooth.Coverage: Blue tooth covers a large area than NFC.NFC is easy to use, no need to pair device like a blue tooth connection.

Anyway NFC is highly useful for its own application, which is going to future by Go Mobile, like google wallet.