Combining RFID Tag Reader with Mobile Phone: An Approach to Realize Everyone's Ubiquitous Appliances

RFID (radio frequency identification) tag is a key technology for finding objects around us and is ready for take-off for the real services. On the other hand, recent development of wireless technology makes almost everyone carry mobile phones with Internet accessibility and various other functionalities. Therefore it is natural to combine RFID tag reader with mobile phone to provide context-aware services, i.e. kinds of ubiquitous services. In this paper, we describe KDDI's experience on the development of mobile phones with RFID tag reader functionalities. We also show the results of actual field tests using the prototype of mobile phones we developed