14 DAY TRIAL // As expected, Google has unveiled its mobile payments system, dubbed Wallet. With Google Wallet, smartphone users will be able to pay at stores that accept the system with their phones, but also redeem coupons, get special offers and so on. Eventually, they'll be able to store other data in their Wallet, IDs, loyalty cards, pretty much everything you can store in a real wallet.
"Today in our New York City office, along with Citi, MasterCard, First Data and Sprint, we gave a demo of Google Wallet, an app that will make your phone your wallet," Rob von Behren and Jonathan Wall, Founding Engineers on Google Wallet, announced.
"You’ll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC). We’re field testing Google Wallet now and plan to release it soon," they explained.
"You'll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk... Someday, even things like boarding passes, tickets, ID and keys could be stored in Google Wallet," they added.
Google is just filed testing the system now and will launch it, still in limited testing, over the summer. It will be available in New York and San Francisco at first.
The company has partnered with key players in all relevant areas, Citi, Mastercard, FirstData for payments and Sprint to carry NFC enabled phones. It has also partnered with plenty of retailers to get things rolling.
Google Wallet already works with Mastercard Paypass, meaning that you'll be able to use your phone to pay in about 120,000 locations in the US and 300,000 worldwide. Of course, it's not available in all those places yet.
Though Google is announcing the product now, it won't become common place for at least a year and possibly more, that is, if it manages to be a success at all.
The biggest drawback at the moment is the lack of phones with NFC chips. There's only one on the market, Google's own Nexus S. More phones are coming, that's a given, but it will be at least several months before there is a good selection and clearly more than a year before most smartphones are NFC-enabled.
Another thing that Google needs to nail to make Wallet a success is a healthy ecosystem. It already has some key partners, but it needs more. The company is saying that it welcomes anyone to join, there will be no transaction fees, and Google will support any smartphone, not just Android devices. It also plans to launch APIs for Wallet.
The question is whether others will want to partner with Google. NFC holds a huge potential and big players, Apple and potentially Microsoft, will not just hand over the keys to Google.