After months of planning and careful throughput, Big G has finally release its Google Wallet project for public use although it will only be available for Nexus S 4G users to work with Visa or Citi Mastercards. Despite the lack of support, this didn’t prevent pundits from using the new service as a substitute for their credit card. Likewise, the results is something we already predicted before.
On a nutshell, Google Wallet uses your smartphone’s NFC (near-field communication) in order to act as your credit card. Its system is coupled with Google Offers which makes your phone as your own wallet by stacking your credit card, freebies, bonuses, etc. all neatly accessible on your handset.
To use it, you need to set your PIN which is a requirement before you can connect your credit card details to your smartphone. After that, everything becomes easy as you only need to “swipe” your phone with an NFC sensor to pay.
If you’ll ask me, this may be a revolutionary step as a virtual payment system; but it replacing your wallet when paying a taxi-cab or a simple walk on a hotdog vendor? Not in a decade to say the least. So far, Google wallet is severely limited in several factors like lack of retailers who supports NFC, smartphone compatible with it, and most of the people I know aren’t ready on using the system just yet.
If you’ll ask me, this is the reason why iPhone 5 – though it was rumored to have an NFC – won’t adopt to this system, not on this year but maybe in the future. If you really want Google Wallet to become successful, it should be available first to majority of smartphones and the quantity of NFC-enabled sensors should be as many as those credit-card machines.
Of course, things like these would take years before it happens. Eventually, we’ll see!
You might also like
Tags: google wallet, Google Wallet features, google wallet problems, iphone 5, iphone 5 google wallet
