IrDA
I find it both interesting and hilarious that expensive and high end phones these days come with Infrared ports on them.
I remember a time in 2008-2009 when the last vestiges of Palm_OS devices got bad rap for even having IR on them. I’m not sure that people discounted their usefulness as a smarter universal remote but it seemed like it was simply “outdated” for high tech people. And as far as data transfer is concerned, it was.
But that isn’t all, back in the late 1990s, Palm released a new device that was the Palm III, and it had something awesome, wireless connectivity. It was IR of course, and Palm even made special “Palm III” card inserts for the Pilot Personal and Pilot Professional to add the capability to them. It was very special that you could “Beam” information wirelessly when in those days WiFi was something brand new and pagers were the thing to have.
These days it is called an “IR Blaster” and almost exclusively it is for controlling TVs, cable boxes or almost anything with a normal remote control. You cannot move files though these IR ports with stock roms and I am not totally sure you could even with custom software because, I think the phones that have these ports are one way only. I think they are only transmitters and not transceivers but I could be wrong on that.
It only took 4 short years for something like IR to be cast off and to resurge. Wonder what else could come back? (Like force sensitivity on screens, of which resistive had that capability)
