The controversial RFID technology may have to move over to make room for what could be an even more controversial one. Hewlett-Packard has recently revealed some details regarding a new storage technology they are developing. A miniature storage device that communicates wirelessly, the new device is supposedly capable of transferring at 10mbp/s (much faster than BlueTooth) and is easily used as an RFID replacement. The chips, small enough to be embedded in a sheet of paper or disguised as a self-adhering dot, would be able to store from 256kb to 4Mb of data:
The chip has a 10 megabits-per-second data transfer rate – which HP says is 10 times faster than Bluetooth wireless technology and comparable to WiFi speeds. Storage capacity ranges from 256 kilobits to 4 megabits in working prototypes, which HP says enables it to store a very short video clip, several images or dozens of pages of text. Future versions could have larger capacities.
A much more pleasant use of the technology than RFID would be of course in consumer products, with manufacturers being able to embed wireless storage in just about anything you can think of, whether it be enhancing cell phones, adding it to a key or even embedding voice clips into greeting cards.
HP definitely has a lot of potential for a technology like this, and it sounds neat on the surface. As wireless continues to propagate, it's inevitable that we'll start seeing things like this appear all over the place.