Back on the 11th of October Nokia began shipping the Symbian^3 toting Nokia C7 smartphone, and apparently secreted inside the Nokia C7 is a Near Field Communication chip meaning the device can interact with other devices.

However due to timescales the software to handle the NFC chip was left out of the Nokia C7. But according to an article over on Intomobile by Stefan Constantinescu, and by way of NFC World, the head of Nokia public relations for France, Xavier des Horts, informed French site Teknologik, that the Nokia C7 will gain a firmware update early 2011 to activate NFC.

NFC has been around for quite a while but for some reason mobile phone manufacturers have been rather slow adopting the technology and building it into smartphones. According to the article when Anssi Vanjoki announced he was leaving Nokia, he did say that most Symbian^4 handsets would feature NFC.

Furthermore, Nokia’s senior VP for smartphones, Jo Harlow has stated that all Nokia devices should get more frequent firmware updates and will include new features which don’t ship with first generation software initially, so it would appear that the first of these will be the update for NFC in the Nokia C7.