iPhone 5 To Support Wireless Payments?

The iPhone 4 is only on its way to China now, but we’re already hot on the rumor trail of the iPhone 5. Apple got us thinking last weekend when it hired an expert in mobile payments, and now we’ve got more fuel to add to the fire.
There’s a new rumor floating around that Apple is already testing prototype iPhones which have NFC (near field communication) chips inside, which could allow us to use our iPhones as mobile wallets in the near future.
According to TechCrunch’s sources, Apple’s testing contactless payment-capable iPhones equipped with hardware from NXP Semiconductor, which definitely means Apple are considering this form of wireless payments in the next generation iPhones.
NFC technology allows you to send information between to enabled devices with a distance of around 4 inches. This can be handy for making payments to another device or payment terminal, it’s already in use in things like bus and train cards. It could also be used for transferring data between two iPhones or laptops, in fact any compatible device.
Apple already has over 150 million of our credit cards stored on iTunes, so if anyways got a good customer base to start off this new feature, it’s Apple.
It will be interesting to see if this finds it way into the next gen iPhone, we’ll just have to wait until next summer