My Experience with the NFC Ring

doctorcdf got a batch of rings from NFCRing for us to try out and I thought I would blog about my experience with it.

The NFC Ring

The ring itself is solid, titanium and looks good. It has the company name on it, causing my wife to accuse me of being married to the company! Just engaged I say

The back of the ring has the magic.

I've worn it solidly since I got it about four weeks ago, and I wear it in the shower, when washing my hands, and also when doing chores. It's got a few scuffs but nothing that wouldn't polish out.

In terms of using it, the only thing I have really done with it is on my phone. I have a Samsung Galaxy S2 i9100P which is about two years old, and it has NFC support.

Setting up the NFC Ring

Initially I downloaded two applications for my phone, NFC Ring Control, and NFC Ring Unlock. Setting up the apps was easy, I followed the instructions here.

In summary, I had to register the ring with the control app, and then configure it in the Unlock app. Once done, a few tweaks to the settings, a test to make sure it worked, and then enable it as a system wide setting. This is all done within the application and is all very intuitive.

Using the NFC Ring and apps

Once I had the initial test working, I left it for a while to acclimatise. I had some initial problems - finding the right spot to hold the ring was awkward to begin with. You have to hold the ring in just the right place for the phone to acknowledge it (they call it the sweet spot), and there are various tips provided to make this easier.

To unlock, when the lock screen is active, you move the ring the spot on the back of the phone that has the sensor (the sweet spot). A sound is played on the phone, and the lock screen deactivates allowing access to the phone. Finding that sweet spot is problematic to begin with. Many people suggest a sticker on the back to guide you, but that I felt was silly because I don't want to have to look at the back of the phone to unlock it.

I tried to set the unlock screen app wallpaper to just a blank screen with a spot where the sweet spot is. However, this was thwarted by a bug in the app that occasionally causes the unlock screen to stop responding (and shut down leaving my phone unsecured). Not desirable! But the authors of the app acknowledge this issue and are working on it, so when this issue is fixed I think this will be an excellent way of resolving the issue of remembering where the sweet spot is.

My method has been much more primitive. Muscle memory! By leaving the sound on for a while and doing it almost every time I wanted to unlock my phone, I now don't need to think or look when I want to unlock my phone, I just swipe to unlock the global lock, and hold the phone in a certain way, and it unlocks. It's taken me some time to get there, but I almost never have problems with it now.

I also found that it was good to leave an alternative method of unlocking in. By default you can only unlock using the ring or with your google account authentication details. My google password is 18 characters long and not easy to type in on a mobile phone, and the risk from shoulder-surfing is quite high. So I've also enabled a PIN - this allows me give the phone to my wife or any car passenger for when I am using the phone for sat nav.

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My Experience with the NFC Ring

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The only other function I've used with the ring is to store a URL or my phone number. These work very well, with the phone unlocked, hold the ring against somebody else's phone, and the URL or the contact card is passed across. I can see uses for this, but it's not for me. I didn't give this function adequate testing to comment properly.

Issues

The ring is perfect! I love it. The app needs a bit of work.

My main issue with the unlock application is that it isn't a lock screen, it's an application that is always on top, and this results in some funny quirks. The first is that I still need to have a lock screen for the functionality that I like on my lock screen. Things like the time and date, and the place for my audiobook client to show pause buttons. So I now have two lock screens, a simple low security swipe lock screen, and then behind that I have the NFC unlock app. You can see this in the video.

I'd prefer this if it was a proper lock screen, with all of the options that I can include on a lock screen. Then I'd have no need for a second locking mechanism.

The second issue is that because it's an application, it can't block system functions. So, for example, with the nfc lock screen up, you can make the status bar appear, and swipe this down to see all notifications and enable and disable system functions. Not ideal - but mostly not significant drama. Certainly not a deal breaker.

What is more concerning is that because the locking app appears always on top - it bypasses the ability to shortcut the lock screen to make a call to emergency services. There is no way to call 999 ( or 911, or 112 ) from my phone at present without knowing how to unlock it - meaning that if I am ever in an accident, people can't use my phone to call an ambulance.

However, I have no doubt that the software support will improve in time, and have no doubt that the app will improve. And I can hear my friends say "You're a developer, why not write an app to handle this yourself?". Well, I might just do that

Conclusion

It's a very nice piece of tech, with significant potential. Support for this will improve with time, and I'm excited to see what future development will do with this technology