Can also recomment "Sqwincher" (stupid name aside) products.

https://www.sqwincher.com/products/single-serve-qwik-stik-zero/

As they market primarily to people working in construction / other trades - and are therefore sold at the likes of electrical and safety supply stores - we buy them in bulk for when we're spending weeks installing racks of servers in our datacentre at work.

It sounds like you're thinking of LoRa, another 900MHz radio protocol.

LoRa has similar bandwidth to Zigbee (125kbps), and as you say is designed for low-power devices running on battery. I have PIR motion sensors at home which have used only around a third of their battery after 2 years.

Security cameras seems to be a large target market for HaLow though, where you need a couple of megabits at a few hundred metres.

My last laptop (owned from 2013-2020) had an NFC reader under the touchpad.

I managed - exactly once - to get my phone to send a file to it using Beam. Did everything exactly as expected; initiated the transfer by NFC and sent the file over Bluetooth.

I could never repeat the experiment. Once, and only once.