Nexus One and Nexus S users will now get the Android 2.3.3 update with cool new Near field communication (NFC) capabilities. If you own a Nexus S or Nexus One, you will soon see a notification on your phone in the coming weeks asking you to update your Gingerbread to Android 2.3.3 via Over-the-Air (OTA) when it comes available to you.
So what’s exactly Android 2.3.3 has to offer for us? Well the major bump is adding some more NFC goodness to your Android. As Android SDK Tech Lead Xavier Ducrohet posted at the Android Developers blog, Android 2.3.3 include there major new NFC capabilities:
1. NFC reader/writer API for developers so that they can build apps that can read and write to any NFC tag.
2. Advanced Intent dispatching: More intents are now available that let the app decide how it wants to act on any NFC tag that it reads.
3. Peer-to-peer support (limited as of now), meaning that you can quickly transfer data of small sizes like photos with other NFC capable devices by brining them closer (we have been seeing this kind of P2P exchange over the years with the Infrared enabled mobile phones and to some extent with Bluetooth though the later does allow longer range).
If you don’t want to wait till the OTA update comes to your NS or N1, you can manually download the zipped packages (.Zip) of the OTA update from the links available at the XDA forum.