Isis, the mobile wallet venture that has been backed by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless, has announced that it will initiate a national rollout of service this year and will include support for Apple’s iPhone, as reported by Bloomberg.
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“What you’ll see coming from us is a vastly improved product, a variety of new places to use it, a vastly improved user experience,” Ryan Hughes, chief marketing officer at New York-based Isis, said in an interview.
Prior to this announcement, Isis had begun testing its services at 4,000 locations in Austin, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah. Isis CEO Ryan Hughes revealed that in these tests, Isis users made payments with the phone more than ten times a month on average, and claimed that two-thirds of users in the test program opted to receive advertisements and offers from their favorite brands. This form of advertising would be something that carriers would use to capture new forms of revenue as the number of new smartphone customers grow.
Transactions using near-field communication (NFC) technology are expected to hit $110 billion by 2017, and has been included with many phones that run Google’s Android platform like the Samsung Galaxy S4, and phones that run Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, such as the Nokia Lumia 925. Apple’s iPhone does not currently have NFC capabilities, but the company has been rumored to integrate the technology with the potential launch of the iPhone 5S in the Fall.
Top Rated Comments
Wow, so sad to see Apple in this position where they're always playing catch up.
Rubbish. Apple don't just chuck in new technologies for the sake of it. As other people said, they wait for it to be widely adopted, or perfect the technology before putting it into their products.
IMHO, it's sad to see other manufacturers in a position where they don't take any pride in their product, and have a mentality of chucking stuff on a wall to see what sticks.
Wow, so sad to see Apple in this position where they're always playing catch up.
The chips have been available for quite some time. My guess is APPLE has deliberately held off on this technology, waiting for wider adoption. Timing is everything, and until there is the underlying infrastructure, necessary to make payment via NFC an option that has been adopted by a reasonably large percentage of the industry in general, and retailers in particular, introduction of this tech by APPLE in their hardware, would have been a disappointing experience for those of us sporting iOS devices with such technology.
Wow, so sad to see Apple in this position where they're always playing catch up.
Catch up? Adding NFC to the iPhone will be what makes NFC go mainstream at retail locations.
Look at all the Android phones that have NFC and how few locations are equipped to take advantage of NFC. My HTC One has NFC and I can't even use it because Google Wallet is blocked or doesn't work or whatever!
I bet as soon as NFC is added to iPhone, companies will be lining up to add NFC capabilities to their cash registers.
Does this mean that iPhone 5S has NFC for sure?
There is not going to be any NFC Chip in the iPhone for now. The reason is lack of space for it, and the fact that Apple don't believe in NFC. Apple is betting on Bluetooth 4.0, also called Bluetooth Low Energy or Bluetooth Smart.
Bluetooth 4.0 can be used in the same way as NFC, but also in a lot of ways that NFC can not. Apple will therefore hold off on trying to incorporate a NFC chip in the iPhone.
I would say rather than waiting for a technology to take off, it's hard for them to take off WITHOUT Apple being involved, and NFC is a perfect example of this. I have no doubt that if it is implemented in the next iPhone, then it will finally get the boost it needs to become widespread.
(Then Apple can claim to have "invented" it like they did with "multitouch" and "smartphones" ;-) )