I've got one of those Barclay's Orange Contactless Phones and I've been trying it at McDonalds Today. It's pretty good, the staff seemed surprised I was able to pay by holding my phone over their reader. There's a pretty big incentive from Barclays too because they give to £10 to spend then 10% cashback on everything for 3 months. What's good is you can see what you've spend and what you've got left all the time. You can even set the phone so you need a PIN for each transaction or just to unlock the phone before payments can be made. The other point is you can register different cards against the wallet so you can switch between funding accounts depending on how much you have available in them. There is also a neat funtion which allows you to programme Contactless tags (stickers or cards). So for example you could programme a tag to send a certain text message if you tapped it or to top it up. Not bad.
As stated above, paying by mobile phone has been around in Asia for many years, even for purchases from vending machines.
Also Sony vaio laptops for the past few years come with a 'felica port' for internet shopping via mobiles... it might also work for the the equivalent of the Asian oyster cards.
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They're not. The majority of phones have proprietary software. Only a small proportion are osx or android, though this will increase.
Yes, some may be able to use Java apps but not unless the hardware is built in, like bluetooth.
(self-confessed gadget freak:))
They're working on it
Also Sony vaio laptops for the past few years come with a 'felica port' for internet shopping via mobiles... it might also work for the the equivalent of the Asian oyster cards.