IMO one of the biggest failures of android devices is the lack of unification on the NFC coils location. Extending the range is a bandaid, but welcomed.

Apple did it right by putting it at the top of the phone. Touching the top of the phone is so much more intuitive than awkwardly sliding your phone up and down the reader until the coil somewhere in the middle of the phone lines up. Maybe android beam could have been an actually useful feature if they hadn’t fucked it up.

NFC Release 15, with an increase from 0.5 cm to 2 cm.

I thought distance was limited to the diameter of the antenna?