Today at Google’s Press Conference, they introduced what they say will be the next best thing in mobile payments. They have named this product Google Wallet.
Google Wallet will work hand in hand with Near Field Communication, or NFC for short. For those of you who do not know how NFC works, here is a brief explanation, and a graphic to go with it.
A perfect example, “Fast Pass” for Credit/Debit cards that certain stores have set up, where you just tap your card to the machine, and that’s it. With NFC, you would just open the app, select which card you would like to charge, and tap your phone to the machine (softly of course)
Now, the downside to this technology is that at present, there are only 2 phones that contain the NFC Chip. The Google Nexus S by Samsung on T-Mobile, and the Google Nexus S 4G on Sprint.
Google understands that, and has designed an add-on for most devices that do not contain the NFC technology. However, this isn’t a hardware add-on, it will be in the form of a credit card sized sticker that will be placed on the back of your phone. The sticker will contain a certain type of technology that will be able to communicate with the NFC machines at the store counters.
There are a few issues I see with this however. The first one, is the obvious one; you’ll have a sticker on the back of your phone which holds your credit card info; thus putting you at a big risk for identity theft if your phone is ever lost or stolen. Second, the sticker is only able to hold 1 credit cards info. So yes, you will have NFC-like functionality, you will just be limited to 1 form of payment.
Let us know what you think about this new option in the comments below.
Source: TechCrunch, Google Wallet, Droid-Life
