Un-freakin-believable. What’s the saying, that people always underestimate technological progress in the short term, and overestimate it in the long term? It’s true… ten years ago I’d have said this couldn’t happen in less than twenty years.
(Oddly enough, I’ve never read any SF stories that incorporated credit cards at all, even technologically advanced ones like this. I guess SF authors thought they weren’t advanced enough, or that physical tokens like credit cards would be obsolete.)
This is going to be a Japanese-only thing for a while, it uses a very popular standard there that’s used for purchasing things with cell phones there already. I think it will take a while before our banking industry gets their act together with proximity check-out.
That’s okay, I’m not sure I see any need for it here. My bank just went to “chip and PIN” cards, where you have to put your card in a reader, key in a PIN number, and leave the card there until the transaction is complete (remove it too soon as the transaction is canceled). That’s enough technological progress on the credit card front for me.
Though oddly enough, my latest card also includes the symbol that looks like four nested right-parentheses, which I believe indicates NFC. I’ve never tried using it though, the only places around here that I think might accept it are a couple of gas stations, and I seldom use a credit card for gas.
I find the idea of having it on a cell phone better, it means one less thing to carry around. Having a credit card use the same system kind of defeats the purpose. Of course, if I had to carry it around on a cell phone, it’d better have identification checking available, though actually in the case of theft it’s probably easier to deactivate than a standard credit card, so I’m not sure if there are practical security concerns…