Considering the compatibility issues caused by tag position and orientation combined with phone antenna/reader circuitry performance and the effects of variations in manufacturing, I recognize that no one person has all the answers regarding a particular model of phone. However, I am interested in seeing as much data gathered on as many phones as possible.
I don’t know how to do this best. I was thinking at first people could post their anecdotal evidence, and someone could then compile that into lists of phones that “always” work, “sometimes” work, “rarely/never” work.
The problem I see is “sometimes” could mean too many things like: inconsistent performance within an individual unit, inconsistent performance with different tags, or inconsistent performance across multiple units of the same model.
I’d like to get an idea of what to expect if/when I decide to replace my phone. Or maybe even help me decide what phone to get.
The only way I see this working is to create a video library of people using an xLED to illustrate position and rotation data, then categorizing phones as “reads” and “does not read”. If we have video of the xLED being used in both cases, then we can know for certain that an effort to test field strength was done, and a person can both find phones that “read” and watch video of the xLED in action.
We may even be willing to provide free xLED-HFs to anyone wanting to contribute to this project. Videos would be sent to us here at DT and we’d make the archive. So, steps would be;
- Get an xLED-HF
- Record a video of yourself testing a phone with it
- The video must contain a test of the xLED and an xNT read attempt
- Send the video to DT, we archive it
- We create a yes/no spreadsheet with links to video tests
Sound like fun?