Microsoft is rumored to be adding a newly popular feature in Windows Phone 7, and that is Near Field Communication, or NFC. It will supposedly ship on smartphones later this year, which means the software/OS part could be part of the Mango update. Nokia said that it would be implementing NFC on most of its smartphones in 2011, so this could be a push by the Nokia-Microsoft partnership.
For those of you that don’t know, NFC is a mobile-payment technology. It would let your phone wirelessly communicate with a nearby device at a checkout counter to pay for your purchase. You could also redeem coupons, get loyalty (rewards) points, etc., all from your phone! Google enabled NFC in Android and released the first handset that supported it back in December 2010. Apple is also rumored to be working on it for iOS.