Pay For Stuff With Your Mobile Phone!
A brand new technology is on the way for mobile phones – the near field communication (NFC for short) chip. This has been a feature of phones in Asia for a couple of years now, with a short-ranged 13.56 MHz signal, useful over a range usually about 4 cm but can be up to 20 cm, it can be used to swipe the phone to make payments. For instance, it would allow your phone to be used as a credit card or to buy bus or train tickets at a turn stile. This is how it has been used in Asia and it is being publicised as the biggest technology to hit the US & European mobile phones for years; however until now this has not happened.
The setup required to use the chip in Europe and the US is not in place quite yet. Many shops were reluctant to invest in expensive equipment that would only be used by a small number of customers. A few companies have now decided to push the issue though, so adoption is beginning to become more widespread.
One of the best features of NFC is the way it uses an initiator and a target, the initiator could be the ticket machine or paying point in a shop whilst the target can be an unpowered chip, allowing it to be included in items such as cards, keychains and so on, enabling it to draw it’s power from the initiator.
The technology is still absent from many recent phones, so you won’t be seeing it just yet in the likes of the Nokia E6, but it is making an appearance in some top of the line phones. Samsung and Google’s Nexus S is an interesting example, because the original Galaxy S – which the Nexus S is very strongly related to – lacked this ability suggesting it was Google who thought it was an important addition.
This could also be connected to the unexpected absence of a microSD slot on the Nexus S, something Android users have become accustomed to (and a feature incorporated into the Galaxy S), in order to increase the phone’s internal memory.
Some of the technologies being demonstrated at the recent MWC, Mobile World Congress, were based on the niche created by phones like the Samsung Galaxy Ace and the HTC Wildfire S lacking NFC technology.
The first of these is from Visa, who, similar to Google, chose to take steps to push the adoption of NFC technology. It utilises a card that fits into the microSD slot of the HTC Wildfire S & communicates with apps on your phone to give complete NFC functionality. While this denies you the use of the slot temporarily, the ease with which microSD cards can be swapped, even in phones which do not allow ‘hotswapping’, should not make this much of a problem.
The impact of this technology should be significant as almost all retail businesses will very quickly move to allow this option. In addition, services such as public transport will have to build card readers which will make paying for tickets far more efficient for consumers.
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June 16, 2011 | Posted by Edmund Clare
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