Nokia Betalabs

maybe I should add that, if the application does not crash upon detecting a card that uses the ISO14443Connection-Interface (i.e. when a non-Mifare ISO1443A-card is touched), the UID that was read from the previous tag will be shown (I had had noticed that in my application too), so the NFC Games will treat that card like being the same as the previous one that was touched...

Thank you very much for this info. So you've seen our apps crash completely (without handling the error) if you touch a ISO-14443B card? This is very interesting and useful to know, and I'll look into it.

Meanwhile, have you been able to play with the games using other types of cards?

Feel free to share your experiences and thoughts, both on how to get cards to play with, and also on the games themselves.

Thanks!

- Luis

Do you happen to have any paypass-compatible MasterCard for testing (in combination with a C7 running Anna)?
It happens on both C7's I have, and it really seems to be an issue with C7/Anna and ISO14443Connection, which is apparently just not implemented yet...

For the contactless version of the German "GeldKarte" electronic purse system (http://geldkarte.de/_www/en/pub/geldkarte/geldkarte_users.php), I wrote a Java Application years ago, to read the current purse balance, and it worked fine on the old Nokia 6131 NFC, but it won't on the C7. However, it doesn't crash, because I only set the TargetListener for ISO14443Connection, and no target will be detected at all.
Curiously, the Card *will* be detected (and crash with NullPointerException), if the Listener for NDEFTagConnection was set (though I guess this is normal, as it could also be a Type4 NFCForum-Tag containing NDEF? unfortunately it is not really formatted according to the Type4 Tag specification, maybe that causes the error...)

Anyway, I think you don't need to care about that, it's probably fixed in Belle already. Someone reported a citibank payment tag to work, so I guess he used one of the newer phones already!?! ;-)

Now (at last) for the games:
I have to admit, as a non-native English speaker, the nursery rhymes and Shakespeare quotes were somewhat difficult to me, even in 'easy' mode ;-)
(or are those rhymes supposed to be completely unknown, even to english speakers?! though the expected learning effect is not enough incentive to keep playing these for a longer period of time)

I played the flags game with 10 tags, but mostly in flag-to-flag mode (it would be too annoying otherwise, when it takes so long to get everything right, but that might be just me knowing so little flags of the world ;-) )

One thing that could(?) be improved (if possible by hardware):
I got the "tap your choice again" error very often, since I didn't really lift the phone up between 'touches', but rather slide it over the tags ;-)
however the flags game does not seem to have (or simply does not display) this error?

After all, it's a nice idea to have some kind of "augmented reality memory card game" :-) and great to encourage users to find out what cards are actually nfc-capable today, and get familiar with the technology already, during the few more years until fully adopted in the mass-market (payments etc.)

-Sebastian

Hi Sebastian,

Thanks for all these details.
Regarding the ISO14443b behavior, let's discuss it privately, so we can talk in more detail.
If you are OK discussing over email, send an email to nfcgames@ovi.com, so I have your email address, and then I'll email you back.

Regarding the games ... I am glad you are able to play it.

The difficult is a bit of balance. We don't want it to be too easy (otherwise, it's boring), but also not too hard.
I'm actually glad that you didn't find it too easy :)

Did you know there is a "Hint" button?

It's there on the screen in the Shakespeare and Nursery Rhyme game. Just press it and it will give you the whole quote, so you can learn it and try it.

The time continues running while it's saying the quote, so you probably can't use the Hint button in Medium or Hard mode. The idea is that you can use it in Easy mode to learn the quotes. After a while, when you're familiar with the quotes, you can then start doing Medium and Hard mode -- and you can impress you friends with knowing all these Shakespeare quotes :)

Regarding "tap your choice again" ... the reason for that is actually not an NFC issue. The NFC reader is actually detecting the tags just fine and quick enough in this case. It's not an "error".

It's actually a solution to a user-experience issue. Specifically, if you tap two tags, A and B, too quickly, then the phone will still be playing the audio clip for tag A, while your hand is already on top of tag B. In that case, you will probably think that the audio you are hearing belongs to tag B, and you'll get confused.

So, what we do is, if you tap a second tag before you get the chance to hear enough of the audio of the first tag, then you get the "tap your choice again" warning. Basically, it's saying that the phone is not going to play the audio for your second tag, in order to avoid confusing you.

Just wait until you hear at least the beginning of the audio plays, before you tap another tag. It's roughly about 1.5 to 2 s. If you do that, you'll avoid the "tap you choice again" warnings. (If you notice, this is what the message actually suggests that you do.)

I hope that helps.

best regards,

Luis

I have to admit, I didn't play it with the volume turned up loud at first, so I rather focused on the text than the audio. But it really seems to be easier now ;-)
As for the hint buttons, I saw them but never actually tried what would happen, don't know why. For the nursery games button, it almost looks like representing some kind of arrow or caption to the picture, i.e. I initially thought the picture was supposed to be the 'hint'...

So maybe you could try to make the hint button look more like the other buttons (cancel / help), even if the UI would look less beautiful then.

-Sebastian