How to Connect External NFC Card Reader to Tablet

Question

Right now I am having Tablet having OS Android 2.3.3 instead of NFC phone,so I need to connect External card reader to tablet.Please tell me which card reader should I prefe

Answer 1

The built-in NFC library in Android 2.3 and 4.0 only supports the PN544 NFC chip by NXP Semiconductors. I don't think there are any card readers on the market that use it, as this chip is specifically designed for use in mobile devices. You may be able to find alternative implementations of the Android NFC API that support other NFC chips, though.

Another issue may be that your tablet most likely does not have the required NFC libraries installed, including the required system service (NfcManager). After all, your tablet has no NFC support, so it does not need these software components. So a new ROM system image would have to be created for your tablet that includes these software components.

Taking one of the many common desktop readers is probably not really feasible. Creating all the necessary software to integrate it into Android is not really a trivial task. It may be easier to just buy an Android phone with NFC or wait if an Android tablet with NFC comes out.

Answer 2

Neither Froyo 2.3 (min SDK version supporting NFC) or Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 are compatible with a wide variety of chips.

When a manufacturer launch a new phone with a different NFC chip is because someone have created the drivers to use such chips and interface with Android's NFC classes, specifically the NfcManager class and the NfcAdapter class wich represents the local NFC adapter.

Best case scenario, you could use the Android NDK to create low level C/C++ classes to communicate somehow the External NFC Card reader with Android and then make more custom programming with the NDK to make the NfcAdapter on the SDK to detect it... and there are no warranties that you'll succeed.

And... if you are thinking about going to http://www.alibaba.com and import a tablet with NFC reader, think twice, because that ones might not allow you to do all what the NXP Semiconductors chip does with Android Beam (TM) such as Read/Write and support different I/O operations with NFC-A, B, F, V or ISO-DEP.

For your time's sake (and because time is the most valuable asset for anyone these days). I think your best option is to get a couple of NFC Phones such as the Galaxy Nexus S, DROID Razr, Xperia S, HTC Incredible, etc... those will work right out of the box, that's what we are doing.