Contactless payments are the future, and that future isn’t too far — in fact, Samsung and Visa have already laid out plans to unveil an official app to make payments at Olympics securely using the NFC tech, which will not require users to scratch a plastic card, and rather pay using the phone itself. You do need a phone with NFC chip inside, and at the moment they are really rare — only Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S phones have it. But with NFC equipped microSD card coming on soon, any phone compatible with such card installed will be good for contactless payments.
Called the payWave — named after the Visa’s contactless tech itself — the app will be demoed at Mobile World Congress Event holding on from Feb 27 to March 1, where we expect we will see lots of new phones, tablets and other cool stuff like this.
Using this app, people will able to pay at Olympics by just holding their phones near to any of the contactless readers installed by the Visa. For additional security, transactions above the value of 15 pounds will require a passcode to authorize the transaction.
And that’s not all. Samsung and Visa are also looking to launch a specific Olympic phone — details of which are not known yet — which will have Olympic stuff pre-installed with it, among other things.
So, you ready to say goodbye to bad old credit cards?
