Vodafone Australia announce that they will bring Smartpass NFC payments to Windows Phone

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imageVodafone Australia is piloting an Android app which will allow the Galaxy S 3 to pay using NFC at 100,000 Visa payWave NFC payment terminals in Australia.

They have also announced they will be bringing the service to Windows Phone said Vodafone general manager, Thomas Roets, to Computerworld Australia.

There are no plans to make the app available on the Apple iPhone because the device does not include NFC capability, Roets said. Vodafone considered NFC-equipped sleeves for the iPhone but decided it was too costly. Such a case is expensive to build and would have had to be resized for different form factors, he said.

Roets estimated that 80 per cent of Vodafone’s new devices in store will support SmartPass.

While SmartPass is exclusive to Vodafone, Visa wants to release similar apps for other telcos, Visa country manager Vipin Kalra said. “Our goal is that we bring the solution to as many consumers as possible,” Kalra said.

SmartPass is “a step towards a true digital wallet,” Kalra said. “A digital wallet sits in the cloud, whereas [SmartPass] is an app sitting on a SIM,” he said. “Eventually what we want to do is bring face-to-face and online purchases to one device.” Visa hopes to get to that point sometime next year, he said.

Windows phone 8 comes with NFC support and a built-in Wallet service from the start, but will likely see its first implementation on Orange in France, who has always been a proponent of the technology.

Read more at ComputerWorld Australia here.

More about the topics: nfc, wallet, windows phone 8

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