Orange UK: Galaxy S III, first droid with Quick Tap NFC payments

NFC promises to allow phones to take over a lot of functionality, including paying at a store. Orange and Barclaycard announced that the Samsung Galaxy S III will become the first Android smartphone to support their Quick Tap contactless payment service.

Quick Tap lets you pay up to £20 by tapping the phone on the payment terminal (optionally, you can set the phone to ask for PIN first). These payments have full fraud guarantee.

You can have up to £150 in your Quick Tap account and adding more money can be done with any UK MasterCard or Visa credit or debit card (you can add sums between £5 and £100 at a time). The phone will alert you when the account is running low.

Starting from September 5, Orange will be offering Quick Tap-enabled Galaxy S III phones. Better still, if you get one before October 5, your account will be loaded with £50.

You can check out this page to find stores that accept Quick Tap payments. There you'll also find more info on how to activate the service, security and managing your account.

Samsung and Visa already tried to build up hype for contactless payments with a special Galaxy S III at the Olympics (that used Visa's PayWave system though).

By the way, Quick Tap is already working with another Samsung phone - the Samsung Star or Tocco Lite as they call it in the UK.

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