Gingerbread is on it’s way “in the next few weeks” and Eric Schmidt has revealed a new feature – using your phone as a credit card.
Using a technology called “near field communications” this is the same as you get in a Barclaycard, where you just wave your card/phone at the shop’s machine to pay for low value goods.
Gingerbread will have the software support for this built in, which also needs hardware support and Eric demonstrated a phone with the NFC chip in.
Google say this will be for 3rd parties, and they have no plans to use the technology themselves, although that seems a little strange, given they already have an online payment service (Google checkout) and integration with that would seem an obvious development.
Interestingly NFC payments is one of the new features rumoured for the next iPhone, so maybe this will push it from rumour to reality.
Link – PCPro/Reuters