“The bigger iPhones, which have been widely written about over the last year, will come in two screen sizes, one measuring 4.7 diagonal inches and the other 5.5 diagonal inches,” Brian X. Chen reports for The New York Times. “The larger version will cost more. Unlike the older iPhones, which have somewhat sharp edges, the new ones have softer, rounded edges similar to those of the latest iPads.”
“To deal with concerns that a bigger phone will make typing with one hand difficult (the current iPhone has a four-inch screen), some changes to the design of the iPhones’ user interface will allow people to type or use apps with just one hand; there will be a one-handed mode that can be switched on and off, two employees said,” Chen reports. “The smartphones will include hardware and software that support a technology called near-field communication, or NFC, which allows devices to exchange information wirelessly over very short distances. It could make paying for things with a phone less of a hassle.”
“Apple has teamed up with American Express, MasterCard and Visa to support the payment system, said several people involved in the partnerships. With the deal, these people said, iPhone owners will be able to use their devices as a sort of digital wallet, improving their ability to pay for items at select partner merchants without handing over cash or a credit card,” Chen reports. “Along with these partnerships, the abundance of new NFC-enabled iPhones could jump-start mobile payment, which has so far failed to gain traction among American consumers… Some analysts think Apple’s entrance into the world of mobile payment will make all the difference. ‘Apple owns the hardware and the software here, unlike Google,’ said Josh Beck, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. ‘Not to mention Apple has this huge cache of customer credit cards, and an affluent customer base.'”
Read more in the full article here.
Don’t know about you, but I store NOTHING on the cloud, I don’t use the fingerprint sensor and I trust NO ONE, including Apple Inc. or the US government with any of my information. Why in the world would I use my phone to store payment info? I don’t post my name or face on social media because there is NO trust anymore. Apple Inc. needs to do something to allow for total encryption of info and data for me to be comfortable using their iPhone for anything other than a glorified music player that cannot be connected to the internet for fear of agencies tapping all my personal info.
Unless you were born in the backwoods and never went to school, the various levels of government – U.S., state, and local – very likely have tons of information on you already, from the prints on your birth certificate to your driver’s license to your latest credit card purchase at Home Depot. Even if you don’t have a car, driver’s license, or bank account, and exclusively use cash transactions or bartering, your image is captured many times each day unless you live in a very remote area of the country.
I doubt that you are Grizzly Adams, so your paranoia is not doing a bit of good. An you clearly do not understand the design of Apple’s touchID if you are avoiding it for the reasons that you state.
Another ignorant troll eh?? And I suppose aside from voting for Obama, you have no problem sharing your personal photos, all your documents, you list of passwords, the guy’s address with whom you are cheating on your wife with and EVERYTHING else on your iPhone, right???? Of course everyone leaves a footprint out there, but I damn sure am not going to carry everything around in an electronic wallet so I hand it all over to the next hacker or cop with a scan device to pull al the info out. Do you buy your boyfriends lube and weed on a credit card??? Of course not, you use cash. Are you too dumb to see where you can protect yourself from the prying eyes of others, or did your time in the system beat you down to be a coward and just follow the government in lockstep? And I CLEARLY understand how touchID works…….for now.
even though there is scant chance that you will even read this response to your two posts…
i have always sensed there was something ‘queer’ about mel’s take on things. i just put it down to him being a prig rather than a pr*ck.
Hmmm, yet we’re ok with giving the newly hired, 20 year old car salesman, or the real estate agent we’ll never see again, all of our personal information for a product. I bet you still keep your money in a shoebox under the bed too…
Heh, one-handed mode. Perhaps flash player will be active only for one-handed mode.
The only thing I miss from my Palm is the little utility that switched the interface for left handed users. It moved the most commonly used buttons in virtually any app to the opposite side of the screen allowing more accessible one handed use.
Maybe there will be an extension for that. Get busy developers, please.