Philips, Nokia and Sony are working on NFC

Philips, Nokia and Sony are banding together to create a basic technology that will help gadgets automatically connect with each other.

Near Field Communications helps gadgets work out the best way to swap data when they are brought within a few centimetres of each other.

The first products using the technology are expected by the end of the year.

Talking technology

As gadgets get more complicated the numbers of ways to link them up, either with or without wires, grows too.

As short-range radio communications systems, such as Bluetooth, become more popular, the simple task of linking a handset to an earpiece could get very tricky, said Sour Chhor, general manager for the Near Field Communications project at Philips.

He said linking them simply by searching for the nearest Bluetooth device could produce a long list of potential partners once the technology becomes ubiquitous.

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He said NFC would offer a solution to this problem as it would help devices brought close to each other to automatically pair up.

It was not intended to replace Bluetooth and other radio technologies instead it should help people make better use of them.

He said NFC was a standard way of identifying devices and describing what they can do.

Simply putting two NFC devices together will get them talking to find out how they can swap data.

Once they have negotiated the best way to swap data, the information will be transferred.

NFC is expected to be used in phones, PDAs, laptops as well as PCs, kiosks in train stations and airports and many other places.

It could be used to quickly transfer electronic tickets or vouchers to phones or PDAs or just to help people move music files from a PC to a portable player.

"We want to be sure that new technologies will be easy to use for consumers," Mr Chhor told BBC News Online.

"You should not have to know if it's a 3G phone or CDMA or ADSL," he said. "You just want easy access to your content and services."