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Nokia will add NFC to "some existing (Symbian) devices" early next year, Nokia’s senior vice president for smartphones, Jo Harlow, said in an interview published this week.

Harlow declined to specify which phones would get NFC, including whether any more of them would be part of Nokia's new family of smartphones supporting version 3 of the Symbian operating system, according to an interview published by Bloomberg news. But she said more Symbian phones would support the technology in addition to the C7 smartphone Nokia began shipping last month with an NFC chip inside. Nokia announced in September it would begin to ship Symbian smartphones supporting NFC in 2011.

"NFC is a portfolio play, not a single-device play," she said in the interview, according to Bloomberg. "It works when everyone has it."

While the high-end C7, which supports Symbian^3, has an NFC chip inside, it needs software upgrades to unleash the NFC functionality. And contrary to the Bloomberg article, which stated the C7 could support NFC payment at the point of sale, NFC Times has learned the handset does not support card emulation and, therefore, could not be used in its current configuration at contactless point-of-sale terminals.

Nokia apparently sees NFC as one of the features it can use to try to regain market share from competing smartphone makers using Google’s Android operating system, as well as Apple’s iPhone.

But as NFC Times has reported, Android phone makers are planning to introduce their own NFC devices during the first half of 2011, including those from HTC and LG Electronics. That's in addition to one or more NFC-enabled BlackBerry models from Research in Motion and possibly the iPhone 5 in 2011.

Nokia recently turned the Symbian Foundation. which had controlled the smartphone operating system, into a simple licensing body after handset makers Samsung Electronics and Sony Ericsson fled the group in favor of Android.

Nokia, still the world’s largest phone maker, will deliver software updates to Symbian phone owners more frequently, pledged Harlow in the interview. That could include software updates involving NFC.

"The biggest threat and biggest opportunity is our ability to keep Symbian fresh and interesting," she said.