What Is Samsung And Foxconn's Kiss High-Speed Data Transfer Standard?

Samsung and Foxconn, the world’s largest suppliers of smartphone parts are working toward creating a new file transfer standard, which will enable large data transfers within seconds.

The standard — termed ‘Kiss’ — has been developed by a company called Keyssa and will support gigabyte-sized transfers between devices in close proximity.

While the standard sounds uncannily similar to Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, it is something entirely different.

The transfers will be facilitated by chips embedded inside devices. The chips would use Extremely High Frequency (EHF) carriers to transport data between devices. This technology is expected to run at speeds of 5GB per second on laptops and 1GB per second on mobiles.

The biggest advantage of the technology is that it will make transfers of data between devices easy and eliminate the need for cables. Currently transfer between even light devices such as smartphones are done using cumbersome cables and attached equipment.

As smartphones and laptops shrink in size — for example, Lenovo Yoga laptop, which has a detachable touchscreen — the focus seems to be on easier portability.

More importantly, easier transfer of data will facilitate easier streaming of videos between devices.

So if you want to play a video from your smartphone on your TV, all you will need is two devices embedded with ‘Kiss’ standard chips, and forego the cumbersome system of USB cables, HDMI cables and other connecting mechanisms.

According to Keyssa’s press release, a movie from a smartphone might be easily played on TV using these embedded chips.

“It’s been 10 years since the first iPhone appeared, a device that defines the center of our digital life. But in terms of connectivity and device-to-device interaction, we’re still barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. Soon we will be able to see very high-speed connectivity between the automobile, the home and the phone truly creating a connected world without requiring expensive mobile data connections,” said Tony Fadell, one of the engineers associated with the project.

Keyssa has both Apple manufacturer Foxconn and Samsung onboard for this project, which means this standard might be universally implemented across devices.

Shankar Chandran, head of the venture arm of Samsung Electronics, hopes the standard would become widespread soon.

“Standards tend to get ecosystems built around them in a fairly complicated way,” Chandran stated in an interview to Reuters on Thursday, “What’s needed is a bunch of industry players across the value chain saying they’re going to build to that standard. And that’s really what we have.”

According to Engadget, the Essential phone releasing on Sprint on Friday might come with a "magnetic connector with wireless data transfer," something similar to Kiss connector.

It is not clear where Essential's technology has come from, and with Keyssa saying it has filed more than 250 patents around the technology, including nearly 50 of which that have been issued in the United States, the issue may form a basis of a lawsuit between Keyssa and Essential.