There's no doubt that mobile phones have a continuously increasing role in people's everyday life, providing from various multimedia features or business functionalities to payment options. Leveraging on the fact that almost everyone has a mobile phone, Transport For London (TFL) wants to create a handset to be used for Tube payments.

According to The Guardian, the famous English tabloid, officials from Transport For London have confirmed a partnership with Nokia and O2 to create a mobile phone that will come with a built-in Oyster card and will enable users to pay with it for the Tube journeys. All a traveler has to do is to approach the mobile phone to the ticket-reading machine, just like it would do with a simple Oyster card.

The Oyster card is an electronic ticket launched by Barclaycard, a global credit cards and loans provider and used in London and its surroundings on TFL and National Rail services. In March 2007, there were 10 million Oyster cards and over 80 percent of the journeys on services run by TFL used them.

The new handset from Nokia and O2 will probably use the radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The journeys paid with the mobile phone will be priced with the Pay As You Go method or will be added on the user's monthly phone bill. In the future, this mobile payment system could be used not only for Tube payments, but also for tram, bus or train journeys and not only in London, but all over the world.

It's interesting to see how the new handset will look like as well as what other functionalities will have, besides being a Tube payment method. We believe that the phone will not be an expensive one, as it's targeted towards the wide range of people that use the Tube for their journeys.