Nokia clarifies backing Mobile payments with classic NFC phone
When you see a picture of a really basic Nokia classic design, like the 6216 Classic from Nokia launched this week, it makes you wonder for a moment if the biggest handset maker in the world is really in touch with the real world where people use their phone in wild and wonderful ways and need advanced features like touch screens.
But actually the 6216 is a bit of a breakthrough. Because under its candy bar design, this is both a political and technical step forward in using your phone as a credit card and as a travel ticket and for many other payments.
The political dimension is straight forward. Nokia had previously offered a similar design to the market, one that had Near Field Communications antennas built in and which could be made to work as a payment phone, but it implemented it in a pre-standard way which made everyone worry that Nokia was going to resist how NFC devices might work in future and try to control the technology.
The difference was that it had an NFC chip and antenna but kept identity information in a special chip of Nokia’s design instead of using the new Single Wire Protocol to communicate with the SIM and putting all the identity data on the SIM. The final details of what is called the Single Wire protocol had not even been worked out when Nokia last addressed this market and without it data on the SIM was thought to be insecure. Now that is all fixed, Nokia has shown that it plans to facilitate the market for NFC not get in its way. That’s the political side out the way.
NFC is a way of letting an application on the SIM identify itself securely to a terminal in a shop such as a credit card reader, or at a ticketing barrier, like when you get on a bus or train. The idea is that you touch your phone on a barrier or on a payment till and a financial transaction takes place in a fraction of a second. In London the Oyster card is a good example of NFC technology where you just touch to go through the barriers and your credit card gets debited once in a while to pay for your travel tickets.
With the London Olympics it is vital that NFC terminals are commonplace by 2012, and that your phone can be used to pay for tickets to the venues, and then touched on the way in to prove you have paid, as well as using it for travel tickets, and many low end payments.
Nokia unveiled the phone at the opening of the 3rd annual WIMA conference, held at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco and it is the first of the major handset players to offer a compliant handset, which means that more advanced NFC trials and services can now be set up which work how the technology works in places like Japan, which is the world’s leading country for mobile payments.
The Nokia 6216 classic is expected to start shipping in the third quarter of 2009 in select markets with an estimated retail price of €150 before taxes and subsidies.
"The Nokia 6216 classic will be amongst the first commercial devices in the market complying with operator requirements using the SIM card in connection to secure transactions with Near Field Communications," says Jeremy Belostock, head of near field communications at Nokia. "With the Nokia 6216 classic in your pocket and the ticketing applications on the SIM you can replace the multitude of cards in your wallet. Having the applications on the SIM consumers can bring their secure applications to their next Nokia NFC enabled phone."
Eventually with NFC your handset could replace all your credit cards, your train pass, your gym membership and even cash. This just means we can get on with it that much sooner.
