The good people at Inside Secure have ported over their Open NFC stack to Ice Cream Sandwich, giving OEM's one less hurdle to jump when getting devices ready for upgrading. The new 4.3.3 release allows almost any NFC hardware to become Android compliant by using a Hardware Abstraction Layer and special kernel module to communicate via a set of consistent APIs. What this means to you and I is that hardware developers can now use the free and robust Open NFC 4.3.3 stack to get their hardware working, and software developers can use the Android SDK add-on to communicate with it. This means shorter engineering and development time dedicated to NFC from start to finish -- something that all impatient Android enthusiasts will be happy about.
Inside Secure says to expect new devices using the Open NFC 4.3.3 stack to ship later this year. We don't know if this will be the push needed to make NFC relevant, but it sure can't hurt. For more info, and more technical specifications than you can shake a stick at, see the links below.
Source: Inside Secure; via: PhoneScoop
More: Open NFC developer site
