There is untapped potential in the Wi-Fi radios embedded in our smartphone and tablet devices. In this article we introduce the Wi-Fi Neighbor Awareness Networking technology being standardized in the WiFi Alliance under the name of Wi-Fi Aware (TM), which leverages this potential by allowing handheld devices to continuously discover other interesting services and devices while operating in the background in an energy-efficient way. In addition, we present a thorough performance evaluation based on packet-level simulations that illustrates the performance of Wi-Fi Aware to be expected in realistic scenarios.