Noncontact IC cards in DoCoMo phones--coming soon?

Following the start of its noncontact IC card joint venture with Sony, NTT DoCoMo is cranking up the pace of tests, handing out 5,000 handsets with IC cards to potential partner companies, whose employees are doing field tests to work out the bugs. It looks like, despite some analysts' claims that getting all the partners organised will be "like herding cats," DoCoMo is using its muscle to make things move.

Of the applications in the offing a few are fluffware, but All Nippon Airlines' booking and payment system looks useful; you can book a flight from your cellphone, then turn up at the gate and swipe your phone to get a boarding card. Others we'd rather avoid, such as having the phone function as an apartment key.

While there's the obvious worry if your phone is lost or stolen, we're generally happy about the idea of putting IC chips in phones. For all the talk of "turning your phone into a credit card," we doubt anything so obviously open-ended and risky is likely. What we're looking at is the ability to make small payments for a particular purpose from a pre-charged amount (e.g., for train travel), pick up tickets for something already paid for (e.g. air travel), or use the phone as a commuter pass or member's card. Where it is possible to charge the card up for general purchases (e.g. at a convenience store), you can manage your risk by deciding how large an amount to charge it with. Losing your phone might actually be less of a pain than losing your wallet if there were a centralised service enabling you to place a temporary stop on all the payment apps in the phone, for example. Still, wouldn't hurt to have something like the fingerprint scanners Fujitsu has been putting in its handsets recently for a bit of extra peace of mind.

It appears that DoCoMo originally planned to put the chips into its January 2004 FOMA 900i models but couldn't herd the cats fast enough; maybe the next handset generation after that (spring 2004?) is when we'll see them actually hit the streets.

Nikkei BP article (slightly variable-quality translation) and NTT DoCoMo press release.