One of the coolest features of the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 is the addition of the NFC, or Near Field Communications support, that it has. Apparently, however, some carriers are not ready to step into the world of NFC, and have allegedly told RIM to block NFC or they will not sell the 9900.
If whispers we hear are true, engineers on the NFC team at RIM were told that they had to add support in the code to allow the NFC to be disabled based on the vendor ID that the 9900 uses. From the shadows, our sources in the North of Canada say that both AT&T and T-Mobile have asked for the NFC to be disabled in the 9900, as neither are ready yet nor willing to roll out support for this feature.
Our take is that in order for NFC to gain any popularity it needs to have devices that support it. We would think that the decision to disable the NFC in devices just does not make sense at all over the long haul. Let’s hope that some carriers see the potential in NFC and start to try to get it moving in the right direction.
