UK cell provider Orange and Barclaycard have teamed up to launch Quick Tap, a contactless NFC mobile payment service. Using a phone with a specially enabled SIM card, a customer can pay for a purchase simply by touching it to a retailer's contactless reader. Currently there is a limit of £15 ($25 US) for each transaction.
T-Mobile is planning to escalate its competition significantly in November with not just its primarily iPhone rival the HTC Dream but also two other devices, a release schedule leak at TmoNews shows. The carrier is now believed to be picking up Motorola's ZINE ZN5 on November 3rd as one of its best camera phones, with a Kodak co-designed five-megapixel camera. It will lack support for T-Mobile's 3G but will have Wi-Fi for faster short range access. No word has been given as to whether it would support the provider's HotSpot@Home VoIP calling feature.
A leak this weekend by TmoNews suggests that T-Mobile's US division will have a second iPhone rival after the Android-based HTC Dream. Known as the Samsung Tocco in Europe, the t919 would drop the front video camera from its original launch but would be one of T-Mobile's premier touchscreen devices, coming with a five-megapixel camera as well as a microSDHC slot that can handle at least 16GB of content. The device would support 3G data over the American provider's 1,700MHz UMTS network and so support much faster Internet access.
