The news coming out of this year's RFID Journal Live conference in Las Vegas has a collective focus on hardware: RFID tags and readers, and their expanding capabilities, emerging from vendors.
OATSystems, IBM and Alien Technology, for example, announced May 2 the availability of a "smart reader"—a handheld device that has radio frequency identification applications directly deployed on it.


At the same time, Symbol Technologies announced a bevy of RFID tag inlays that are based on Gen 2, the standard ratified by EPCglobal last year (and being built into products this year). The company also unveiled a prototype of a hardened metal mount tag—the first in a line of products that will be designed to provide intelligent asset management capabilities within RFID tags.


On a related note, Sybase subsidiary iAnywhere announced the 2.1 version of its RFID Anywhere development platform that includes support for both fixed and handheld readers. With this iteration, developers have access to the full set of capabilities available in an RFID reader—regardless of its manufacturer. They also have the ability to add additional capabilities around supporting new tag formats, general-purpose input/output control and reader synchronization for operating in a dense-reader mode.



Source: PC Mag