There are plenty of reviews of the fancy new Dell Latitude Z out there, so I won’t bother going into those details. The one detail I think is really cool is a wireless inductive charging option that lets you just set the laptop down on a little pad and it will charge wirelessly. Of course, I doubt this will work at any kind of range, since you must create a powerful magnetic field to do so… and powerful magnetic fields do not typically mix with computer gear. So, unfortunately my dream of being able to just set my shoulder bag on a hacked up coffee table and expect the thing to charge is probably not going to happen. I also have this dream about charging my cell phone that way.
The one thing you won’t find on any other review (I haven’t yet) is the specs on the integrated “Contactless Smart Card Reader”, which is such horse-pucky. To avoid the nasty press RFID is getting, basic RFID readers are improperly being re-branded as NFC and/or Contactless Smart Card technology. These are all different things, and while there is currently a lot of overlap, and yes convergence will eventually make these technologies indistinguishable, they are different today. The reason I even bring it up is that the name “contactless smart card” does not accurately describe what these devices are. A Smart Card typically has far more processing power at its disposal than RFID tags do today. This is for a number of reasons, the biggest of which happens to be regular old power (electricity). Smart Cards are contact devices and as such can get plenty of stable power to perform operations with. Passive RFID tags do not have this luxury and rely entirely on the power they are able to inductively glean from the field generated by the reader. As such, Smart Cards can carry out far more security related instructions much faster, so by default a Smart Card is very very secure. The same cannot be said for most of today’s RFID tags.
After digging a bit and talking to some tech people over at Dell, I found a list of tag types that the integrated “Contactless Smart Card Reader” (13.56MHz RFID reader) works with:
A = Card Serial Number (CSN) Read, HID Secure Application Area Read, and Read / Write of All Other Application Areas. iCLASS specific anti-collision to support multiple cards in the field. HID Secure Application can be used for pre-boot authentication
B = Read of Card Serial Number (MIFARE: UID, FeliCA: IDm) for pre-boot authentication and via PC/SC 2.01, raw frame communication allowing implementation of both security protocols at application level, MIFARE anti-collision to support multiple cards in the field.
C = ISO/IEC 14443 Part 4 communication via PC/SC 2.01, raw frame communication, anti-collision to support multiple cards in the field. CHUID from FIPS-201 PIV-II cards can be used for pre-boot authentication. Includes support for MIFARE/DESFire in native, wrapped and ISO communication modes.
D = UID read (can be used for pre-boot authentication), raw frame communication, PC/SC 2.01 synchronous card support for specific chip types, anti-collision to support multiple cards in the field.
E = Ability to act as NFC passive mode initiator at 106 kbits/s and 212 kbts/s
Hey Amal! Long time no talk! Was wondering if these new Dell’s will read our EM4102 tags that are in our hands?
Unfortunately no, it’s a 13.56MHz reader 🙁