The problem with Bump is it's not integrated. People seem to forget the advantages of built in integration. Not only does it work better than a stand alone solution, but it gets the message much more across when it's a feature everyone has versus having to go find out about it and download it.
See above. Plus Siri was available in another form on iOS in the form of a third party app like Bump. It didn't take off then, so why use Siri now? Clearly Apple pushing it gets the word out and it being integrated helps a lot.
Yes I know Siri was available prior to Apple buying them, I had the app. That was my point. If Apple saw Bump as something that was really worth their time and worthy of integrating into their iOS/Mac OS family, they would have bought it as they did with Siri.
And I agree completely with it being integrated VS just a random app. Make it part of iOS, EVERY iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch can now share information wirelessly. This is also why I think it's so incredibly stupid that Samsung are marketing the hell out of the feature - it only works with the Galaxy S3! Good luck bumping your phone against every other phone out there, because it won't work. If it had been a universal Android feature, I could understand them hyping it [even though it's still stupid] but it isn't, it's specific to just this one phone.
Will the Galaxy S4 have the feature? Do any other upcoming Samsung devices have it? Or will it be left out and forgotten because it is stupid and nobody uses it.
Apple could do this easily within the existing UI by bringing a version of AirDrop over from the Mac. All they have to do is add an "AirDrop" button to the share menu. Any nearby Apple devices pop up.
You'd have to have authentication for unknown devices, but that should happen anyway.
This is EXACTLY what I was trying to illustrate. Guy is in a board room. He has a PDF on his iPad. He wants everyone else to get the PDF on their iPads to follow along. He turns on AirDrop and so do his colleagues and he pushes the PDF to them. No need for them to all log into DropBox, no need for them to all be bumping their iPads together. He creates a small bubble of wifi magic that connects all the devices together.
I was under the assumption that this is what NFC was. I had no idea the only way to activate NFC on a device (like your phone or your credit card) was to bump it against something else (like the NFC dock at a cash register). I assumed it was either always on, or if I open my Bank Card App, that turns on NFC and lets me wave my card by the receptor. I mean, I've read about more powerful NFC chips that make it so you don't even need to take your device out of your pocket, so I have no idea why a physical connection between devices needs to be made.
How is SMS/MMS/email going to work when trying to talk to a speaker or making a game connection or even making a payment?
Speakers: AirPlay. They already do this and even more are coming. If not AirPlay, then BlueTooth. My iPhone sits in my pocket and beams music and phone calls to my BlueTooth headset and the two devices never once had to touch. I turned on the headphones, entered a code on my iPhone, and that was it.
Game connection: BlueTooth. I load the game. You load the game. It searches for another BlueTooth device running the game. We confirm, and play. Is this not how The Incident works, by using the iPhone/iPod Touch as a controller and the iPad as the screen?
Payments: NFC. Right now, for example, Square has their little card-reader dongle. But I'm sure when iOS devices use NFC, they'll either update the dongle to also have an NFC chip in it for legacy hardware, or do away with the dongle altogether and just use the device's built-in chip.
None of these things require the devices to ever touch one another.
Actually, you haven't had that ability for 5 years - Bump may seem like "the same thing" but it really isn't.
Bump simply listens for movement on the accelerometer to send a request to Bump's servers with the GPS locations of each phone, then anything you share needs to be uploaded from your phone (and most likely via the cellular connection) to their server, and then downloaded back from there onto the target device, using up your mobile data quota. If you don't have a data connection (or if Bump's servers are down), Bump doesn't work. It also has very limited functionality in that you can only use it for the very limited purposes that Bump has envisioned (apparently contact info and photos), whereas NFC can be used by any app on any platform any way they want to use it, as long as both devices have an app that can interpret the tag received over NFC.
I don't know why Bump hasn't taken off. I had never heard of it despite its crossplatformness and I don't know a soul who uses it. But I think you'll be hearing a lot more about NFC in the coming years, and someday Apple will get around to implementing it.
Hahaha holy shit, that's really how Bump works? Wow, that is a convoluted mess. I'd assume it just works that way because of hardware limitations of the older iPhones? It probably never took off because that implementation is terribad. Maybe once the iPhone has NFC Apple will buy it and integrate it properly, but I still would rather AirDrop something than have to clink my phone against another.
