PayPal brings NFC payments to Android, wallets lose self-worth

By Derek Mead July 14, 2011

PayPal, the online transaction king that’s helped an untold number of people pay for the cat sweater of their dreams, is now showing off its newest transaction method using near-field communication (NFC). A quicker and more personal alternative to signing into the PayPal website, the method is powered by an Android widget that sends payment data when two phones are touched together.

NFC has been around for a bit now, but there has yet to be a major player pushing the technology. With PayPal demonstrating the new capability on Samsung Nexus S smartphones powered by Google technology, it’s an understatement to say that there are big people now supporting NFC for consumer use.

“We’ve been looking at NFC technology for a while and we saw a tremendous opportunity to combine the best of NFC and the best of PayPal,” Laura Chambers, senior director of PayPal Mobile, said in a blog post announcing the service.

While the tech has yet to be put to use by any broad number of consumers, it does offer an excellent alternative to increasingly-popular mobile credit card readers. Both technologies show we’re clearly headed away from the world of cash, and, in PayPal’s case, possibly wallets altogether.

PayPal claims it will be rolling out the NFC capability for customers by the end of the summer, but in the mean time, check out a demo of how it works below.

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