That wouldn't have *anything* to do with the 'free money' given to the guinea pigs, would it?

No.

Of course not.

How cynically foolish of me to think that anyone's opinion could be swayed by a nice shiny new phone, and some 'credit' to spend.

Does anyone have a breakdown of the spending profiles of the guinea pigs (without any personally identifiable data, of course!) to see just what proportion (if any!) was spent on BOOZE?

Nokia maybe the first in Europe, but I've been able to do that on my Samsung phone in korea for almost 2 years.

I pay for the subway, buses, trains and the majority of taxis accept it. Heck, I can even use it at a lot of the smaller "7-11" type places and some of the larger department stores.

If I wanted to I could link my phone to my bank account and use it just like a debit card.

-Black Copter 'cuz I can't turn off the gps tracking in the damn thing.

Armed with my oyster card and some gaffer tape I shall shortly be able to pay for travel with my SonyEricsson - beat that nokia.

At least it'll be much easier to track their escape if that happens, in the way people fleeing the country by plain are trapped a) by customs, but also b) by fact airline tickets appear on their credit card bill.

Copter cos if builtin tracking

And the next obvious step after making your phone more valuable than your credit card is to add a fingerprint module so other people can't use it (without stealing your phone and chopping off parts of your body).

Except some tosser probably patented it as a novel and new idea, and is sitting on the patent waiting for lots of cash from mobile phone makers.

Why don't they make a new credit card system called chip'n'print, where the cards have built in fingerprint readers whilst they're at it, and they'd still manage to mess up the design by failing to encrypt something important.

I'm off down the patent office.

1) Nokia is not the only NFC mobile phone manufacturer. I would say that Sagem is actually closer to what a real NFC mobile phone will look like thanks to its My700X.

2) This is definitely not the largest pilot in the Europe: the Payez Mobile pilot (http://www.payezmobile.com/) in France actually involves more than a thousand users, and it offers the same set of applications (transportation and payment).

Still it's good to hear that customers like their NFC mobile phones.

Wasn't there a trial of something called Mondex or something like that in Swindon years ago? That was all about cashless low-value transactions, like buying newspapers etc. Whatever happened to that?

Paris, 'cos it's a no-brainer!

Something has to replace contactless smart cards now the security has been cracked; the question is how long before the Mobile Phone top-up is cracked?