Bright ideas coming from UK Network Orange and Barclaycard with the announcement of the Samsung-built Wave 578 smartphone – featuring that NFC technology which allows for mobile payments to be send via the handsets.
The Samsung Wave 578 is coming our way in the next few weeks and also features a diminutive 3.2” display, 16GB of RAM onboard and a 3.2-megapixel shooter. It’ll come running on Samsung’s own Bada operating sofwtare. No word, however, on the processing power but bearing in mind the purpose of this mobile and its screen size, it’s not going to blow you away but will provide you with a one-stop solution to your money transaction needs when shops, public transport and a number of other service start rolling out near field comms as an alternative method of making a payment.
So keen is Barclays to get customers onboard with the Samsung Wave 578 it’s offering to provide £10 worth of start-up credit on the Orange network and a 10% cash repayment on all mobile payments made in the first 90 days of service.
Teaming up with Orange and Barclaycard and having previously supplied the hardware for Google’s Nexus S, Samsung is making strides in the NFC tech revolution and it’s paying off. And Orange as a network has recently promised a big increase in it’s line-up of NFC mobiles claiming that dozens of new models will be revealed in 2012 and there are future plans to bring a payment variant of the Samsung Galaxy S II amongst them.
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