Disqus
Last week Samsung and Visa announced that they’re going to bring NFC enabled mobile payments to London in time for the the 2012 Olympics. You’ll have to buy a new mobile phone and it’s going to require a “Visa enabled SIM card” in order to work, which doesn’t exactly scream ease of use and mass adoption, but it’s a first step. The phone, obviously made by Samsung, has yet to be revealed, so for all we know it’s either a low end dumb phone or the next flagship device featuring Google’s latest version of Android. Will operators back this? Yes, they’ll be selling the “Olympic Phone”. Isn’t O2 trying to get their own NFC enabled mobile payments platform off the ground? Yes, but it has yet to be made clear how they’re going to execute on that vision.
Make no mistake about it, there’s a race to become your preferred contact-less payment provider, the question is who are you going to trust? Should you wait for your bank, the operator you have now, a competing operator, handset vendors, PayPal, Amazon, the list goes on and on. Some people think 2011 is going to be the year of NFC, but we don’t. It’s going to be more important in 2012, but until Qualcomm gets off their butt and starts integrating near field tech inside their platforms, and more importantly Apple launches an NFC enabled iPhone, this whole mobile payments thing is going to be nothing more than a pipe dream.
It’s not that we’re knocking the tech, we want it so bad it hurts, it’s just the reality of our industry and laughable announcements such as this one that make us doubt every promise we’ve ever been told about how our wallets will soon be nothing more than a distant memory. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
About The Author
Stefan Constantinescu
Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.
