A newly announced mobile phone running Google Inc.’s Android software contains the hardware groundwork for mobile payments.
On Dec. 6, Google announced the Nexus S, a phone built by Samsung Electronics Ltd. that has a built-in Near Field Communication chip.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive, earlier had disclosed an upcoming version of its Android software would support NFC technology, which many in the financial-services space envision as an essential component of turning mobile phones into payment devices.
“The theory, or the case, is that you’ll be able to … eventually replace, literally, credit cards” with an NFC phone, Schmidt said at a conference last month (
It is unclear as to whether the Nexus S will be able to make payments immediately. In Schmidt’s demonstration of NFC, and in a description of the technology on Google’s website, the chip was shown to be able to read information wirelessly from posters.
Simon Wilson, an engineer with Google, said in a video on Google’s website that the NFC technology in the Nexus S is read-only. Wilson also stressed that the NFC chip can be turned off entirely.
“Currently, your Nexus S can only read information from other objects,” Wilson said. “Information from your Nexus S cannot be read by other devices or objects.”
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