The wave of NFC enabled smartphones continues and this one is at a far cheaper pricepoint.
Both the recently available HTC One X and launched Samsung Galaxy S3 expectedly had NFC but now with this announcement (and also Lumia 610 NFC) it shows that NFC is already filtering into more low-mid range devices, this is a positive step as it means more people will be able to use NFC.
Mastercard have made a very nice website which gives an indication of how ready they believe various countries are for mobile payments.
On the site you can download a report and there is also a nice flash animation which gives a global view and also shows a country ranking list. You probably won't be too surprised by the first few countries in the list, but i have to say Kenya surprised me as the 4th most ready on their scale. Its also nice to see the UK fairly high on the list, particularly as we have seemed to lag behind europe in a few other technological advances in telecoms.
A recent report by the Simalliance which is an industry initiative by the leading smartcard vendors (Datang, Eastcompeace, Gemalto, Giesecke & Devrient, Incard, Inkript, Kebt, Oberthur Technologies, Morpho, Valid, Watchdata & Wuhan Tianyu) shows that NFC is now very much growing.
Obviously this is more relevant to the mobile payments use case, but it also shows that along with recent device announcements NFC as a technology is going to find itself in the hands of mainstream users in the near future. If the analyst insight is correct then also expect that NFC will become a hygiene feature for nearly all categories of devices in the next 2-3 years
An extract from the 2011 report:
"The burgeoning market for NFC handsets - estimated by Berg Insight to approach some 700 million devices by 2016 - resulted in 16 million NFC SIM cards being shipped in 2011. This is a significant development as, for the first time, shipments have reached sufficient volumes to be included separately in the SIMalliance annual data"
If your in London tomorrow, there is a NFC London meetup at the screenmedia expo at Earls court from 6pm
Mastercard has announced a scheme so consumers will know if a device has been certified for use with its mobile payment service PayPass®.
Certification means that both the payment provider and the device vendor will be able to use the certification logo in marketing and collateral, thus giving an easy reference to whether the device has been tested and accepted for issues such as providing adequate security.
Read more: Master Card and Visa certify devices for use with their mobile payment services