I was experimenting with this technology almost a decade ago as part of my work as interaction designer:

https://darker.ink/writings/Mobile-design-with-device-to-dev...

It has a lot of potential but unfortunately it has been kept back until now by lack of support and interoperability.

Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed transfer between devices and later web apps as well – by banging your phone against the spacebar. It worked 98% of the time and was faster than AirDrop is today, even though we only had 3G.

Google acquired it and immediately killed it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)

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varenc 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Bump didn't use direct device-to-device communication. A central server correlated the two bumping phones, based on geolocation and accelerometer data, then swapped the data via the server. At least that's how it worked in the early days. (Wiki page confirms)

Since it's relying on your internet connection, skeptical it'd be faster than AirDrop for a large amount of data like photos. But for swapping contacts I bet it was faster since it didn't have to spend time establishing a new direct connection.

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0xfaded 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Waaay back when in Japan, sekigaisen (infrared) was a verb meaning to transfer contact details or photos or whatever between phones via infrared. It was amazing how fast the iPhone took over Japan and killed off their quirky phone ecosystem.

Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous. Every phone has it

	▲	ehnto 18 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I remember being blown away by the Gameboy Colour IR link. You could use it to trade Pokemon. That makes a bit more sense now if sekigaisen was already a popular ecosystem.
	▲	parl_match 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		yes, "beaming" in the us was also used for quite a while. as in IR beam japanese phones were buggy, feature packed monstrosities. a bunch of companies fighting to check as many boxes as they could. it's not a surprise that they got wiped out by an attempt to make a holistic internet communicator. but for a while, there was nothing like them and their ability to get information on the internet
	▲	vel0city an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		My friends in school would send ringtones, wallpapers, and other small files through Bluetooth. It normally worked pretty well no matter the device.

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jmb99 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can almost guarantee it wasn’t faster than airdrop (when it works) is today. I remember using bump on wifi, and it was limited to (shocking) wifi speeds at the time. I have as recently as last week transferred 1GB video files in under 20 seconds using airdrop. That simply was not possible in 2009.

	▲	nickphx an hour ago \| parent [-]
		airdrop uses wifi direct... so

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Affric 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bump was like magic.

The only app I have ever truly thought “this is the future”

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lgvld an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Very cool, didn't know such app had existed, thank you! Wanted to use a similar approach to connect people in a smaller friends-only social network.