You may already have or may be considering the Xperia SmartTags for Sony Xperia or other NFC enabled devices.
They are a powerful little accessory and one of the first NFC tags that look the part and are easily available from a larger number of stores.
You can always buy NFC stickers which are a bit cheaper but maybe not as pretty but are potentially more versatile for the fact you are not limited by the numbers of tags.
it may or may not be clear that with the Xperia SmartTags, you can only use 4, 1 of each colour with any one phone.
So if you thought you may have 4 or more dotted about the various locations you find yourself in then think again.
If you were to scan a second tag of any colour it would only complete the action of the previously programmed colour tag.
The tags are pre-set with codes in the factory. These codes are colour tag related. When you use Liveware manager, you are programming the phone to respond to the tag, so, to one phone, every red tag is identical. But one red tag could trigger different actions on different phones.
This isn’t a big issue but it is one that can be seen as a bit frustrating and one that Sony do not communicate too well to first time NFC customers which these tags really appeal to.
It is just a word of warning. So if you really want to use NFC to full affect you are going to have to purchase 3rd party NFC tags/stickers instead,
About Clove
Actually, you don’t have to buy Sony’s Smartags. Sure they look nice but are totally overpriced. You can buy “empty” nfc stickers on many web sites, then reprogram them from your android device so they become recognized as Sony Smartags. Still, the limit of 1 tag “color” per device remains, which is completely stupid and clearly limits the interest of this system. One could alternatively look at “NFC Task Launcher” as an alternative to Sony – mind however that many of this software’s feature require 100 bytes NFC tags which are more pricey and less frequent.
Hi Fred, thanks for your comment.
That is correct, there are third party alternatives available, some of which we have listed here. We were surprised that certain colours could only be used for certain actions when using the Sony tags, it does seem like a strange choice.