Monday, July 29, 2013

Samsung Tec Tiles. Necessary? No. But damn cool.

I'm constantly impressed by my Samsung i9305 (or S3 4G if you will) Android Smartphone.

Whether I'm firing up sudo commands within the terminal emulator to do some external access testing or using my Qi charger on my desk to power the sucker up again, I'm constantly impressed with what you can do with this unassuming looking device.

I was having a conversation with someone the other day along the lines of "wouldn't it be great if you could just get in your car and your phone would turn on its bluetooth radio automatically?".

While you're at it, why not fire up driving mode and either the music player or Google nav?

I said "yeah - I remember something about Samsung selling programmable NFC stickers" and the inner geek in me thought I'd better have a look...

After a bit of Googling around I found the stickers in question and remembered they were marketed as "Tec Tiles" by Samsung.

For the reasonable sum of approx. $3 a sticker I ordered a pack of 5 off eBay and am well chuffed.

The setup was literally as easy as install the app on your Android phone from the Play Store and select what you want the sticker to do.

You then "write" to the tag (will have to look into this as I suspect the phone actually just reads a sticker ID or something and associates that with commands in a database or something - or it could actually program the sticker - who knows?) and that's it!

I've now got a nifty little Samsung NFC sticker in my car that I simply tap my phone against and I'm in (what I like to call) driving mode.

Necessary? No.

But they're damn cool :)

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