I’m very interested in developing NFC apps, which may or may not interact with mobile devices. But right now, I am starting fresh and would like to know if there is any development toolkit available to start toying with APIs and libraries.
My point is, I don’t have a phone with NFC and I would like to develop something and test some ideas. Can I buy an NFC chip for testing, some dev kit of some kind, without actually buying an entire smartphone?!?
It would be nice to test some ideas and proof of concepts before investing hundreds of dollars. The mobile app for smartphones could certainly be developed later.
If your budget is limited, I would recommend searching for a second-hand Nexus S or a similar device (perhaps even a damaged device, with a cracked screen, as long as it is functional). This costs probably about the same amount of money as a reasonably decent NFC development kit (or less, for a damaged device) and will serve your needs much longer.
Another option would be to just buy a contactless reader that is supported by libnfc, such as SCL3711.
In any case, you probably also want to buy a handful of empty NFC tags. If you are really serious about this, it may be worth investing in tags that are not the simplest and most limited in functionality. In that case, you could go for MIFARE Classic-based tags or DESFire-based ones; these are generally available on-line.
You may also be able to acquire some (used) public transport tickets, library book tags (from discarded books), ski-lift passes, old access control badges, etc. to experiment with. Often you cannot write to such tags, but they may still be nice for experimenting.