Nokia: All smartphones to feature NFC from 2011

what good is this if the technology isnt implemented in public transport systems as well?

This is downright scary; I don't want this in my phone! I don't care if it is on the sim or in protected storage. If it can be used, it can be hacked.

Then again, my city's idea of public transport is one bus that circles the city once a month.

Originally posted by Josipher:

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what good is this if the technology isnt implemented in public transport systems as well?

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The main reason really is that more people in the world have a mobile phone than people with a bank account, particularly in developing countries. Nokia and the other major phone manufacturers see an opportunity there for people to be able to make payments etc. through their mobile phones.

Of course, as you pointed out, you can have the phone but its no good if nothing else supports it. However, its early days, but even at that there are still many many trials and common uses of the technology already. It's not all about the ability to make transactions using your phone either, there's other possibilities. One already in use is "smart posters", where you could, for example, hold your phone within a few feet of a movie poster and download a trailer for the movie, not from over the network, but from the poster itself. You could conceivably do this with existing technology like bluetooth too but there are costs and other things involved.

NFC is also going to be used at all major retail stores soon. Say you have a basket full of items you just picked up in Wal-Mart. You go up to the check out and simply place the basket down and with cheap RFID chips in the packaging of all your products, it immediately recognizes everything in your basket so you can pay up and move along quickly. And that's not future tech, that's done now. NFC actually has fueled many conspiracy theories about people being tracked from satellites or being chipped at birth to be tracked... but its not called "near field communication" for no reason, its a very very short field of communication.

So even if it isn't just mobile phones, NFC is coming up big time.