Shiny Poll: would you pay transport fares with your phone?

New York have just introduced a way to pay for subway fares with your phone. It’s a contactless system based on Visa’s payWave program that simply requires users to wave their phones at a sensor to make a payment.
Think of it – a queue of people waving their phones at passenger turnstiles. It’s not light-years better than slapping a travel card down on a card reader, but it will be slightly faster because no contact is required and it is slightly less for passengers to carry: not their card, just their phone.

PayWave works by asking users to insert a memory card into their phone that can carrry all the information needed to do these transactions. Most smartphones have memory card slots, those that don’t – like the iPhone for example, can get cases which have space for the little card to be fitted in.

Anyway, they like the sound of this over on ReadWriteWeb, but would you use it if this form of payment came to the UK – and to other places like supermarkets.

Visa claim that it’s easy to deactive the chip if you lose your phone… and that it is password-protected and uses “advanced security technology,” to uniquely identify each transaction.