Starting with NFC and Android

I am very new to NFC but good hands on Android. I had found some definition of it on StackOverflow, Google and Wikipedia. I have downloaded the Android SDK for NFC. I have few queries in mind that couldn't be solved after a lot of googling

• What is difference between NFC and other Wireless(Bluetooth WiFi)
• I have HTC Phone with me and on Wikipedia, I found that my phone doesn't support NFC. Can I use NFC SDK for Android that can act as NFC phone?
• There is concept of tag in NFC, I didn't get that.
• What NFC gives us? I mean is it coding API, a library?
• What can I do to make my mobile NFC enable?

Any one who had worked on NFC.For a beginner these questions are very important to understand.

NFC is a very close distance wireless communication (less than 2 centimeters) and cannot be compared to Bluetooth or WiFi as it's speed is much worse - so it's not suitable for transmitting massive amounts of data.

To use NFC your phone needs a NFC chip which has a tiny internal antenna that is able to receive NFC signals from corresponding tags (actually your phone even gives these tags energy). So the tag is just a tiny chip without own energy resources (at least the passive ones) which enable to store some data (often less than 1kb).

NFC is used to enable secure data transfer like paying with a credit card or some other usecases.

Sadly there is no way to just enable NFC on your phone - there are some external NFC kits which may work via USB but those are not offically supported - so you'd have to buy a new phone for that (like the new HTC or Samsung ones).

Best wishes, Tim