The Wi-Fi Alliance needs to do a better job raising awareness of Wi-Fi Direct, industry analysts said.

"The opportunity has not really met its potential to date," Farpoint Group's Craig Mathias said. He attributes that mostly to a weak marketing effort.

"The Wi-Fi people have done a great job of getting the technology embedded in everything we use, but they've done a terrible job of making that useful beyond connecting to a centralized network," said Avi Greengart of Current Analysis.

They run the risk of being pre-empted by the vendor-branded applications that use Wi-Fi Direct, Greengart said. It's also possible that other short-range wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth and Zigbee, could take Wi-Fi's place for some of these uses, he said. That would be unfortunate, because so many products already have Wi-Fi hardware and the chips are inexpensive.

"If you could properly leverage the Wi-Fi installed base ... you'd have a much higher chance of success," Greengart said.