When the Sony Xperia S was announced at CES 2012, Sony revealed that this would be the first of its smartphones to be NFC compatible.
This wasn't the biggest surprise given that many manufacturers have already jumped on the NFC bandwagon but Sony is at least trying something different and will be selling the Sony Xperia S with four NFC SmartTags which can be customised for a number of jobs.
TechRadar managed to get some hands on time with the new NFC technology and learned a little bit more about how you can use it to smarten up your smartphone use.
The SmartTags are all programmed through a widget on the device. From here you choose whichever tag you want – they are colour co-ordinated – then give this tag a series of instructions.
In the demo we were shown, we saw how you can change the Xperia S for a number of scenarios. These were: in the car, in the living room and in the bedroom.
The car scenario was perhaps the most impressive. Essentially, you can stick a SmartTag to your car dock and once it make contact with your smartphone you can programme it to go directly to the sat nav application on your device and synched with a Bluetooth headset.
For the living room scenario, once the phone made contact with the tag then it started up the music app and began streaming music through a Sony speaker.
The final one was the bedroom, here the phone's light dimmed, the clock was shown and the alarm was automatically set.
We only had a quick look at the app, but it looked simple enough to toggle what each NFC chip would do.
The idea that you can have a preset for different uses is an exciting one and one which shows a real-life use for NFC outside of businesses using the technology.
There will be four NFC SmartTags bundled with the Sony Xperia S device, which we can't wait to try out properly in our full-fat Sony Xperia review.