If you live in London you’ll have struggled to avoid the billboards for Barclaycard’s OnePulse cards that combine a credit card with the Oyster travel card.
The upshot is users can make sub-£10 purchases just by waving their card in front of a scanner, like they do with the Oyster. Well, now Barclaycard has said that from early next year, trials will begin of OnePulse using specially-equipped Nokia phones, so users wave their phone, not their credit card.
OnePulse can already be used in around 1,000 places in London, and for the trial several hundred Barclaycard customers will get Nokia phones embedded with the special radio chips - most probably the 6131 NFC (pictured) announced earlier this year.
Nokia reckons mobiles will be safer than contactless credit cards because they can be locked. Some have claimed that contactless cards will be open to fraudsters using portably radio receivers to get people’s card details.
Mind you, there is also another problem. Most people using their Oyster card will wipe it across the reader. If they did that with their phone it’ll soon get covered in scratches - imagine doing it with an iPhone! Hopefully Nokia’s thinking of ways round this!
[Via The Observer]
