Recently, it seems that Starhub and EZlink has been running a trial of mobile payment technologies:

CELLPHONE users can soon pay for a train ride or a burger by simply tapping their mobile gizmos at the fare gate or cashier.
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Altogether, there will be about 20,000 ez-link machines that can read these specially-made phones, which are loaned to the trial users for six months.

Two questions boggle the mind though:

1) For the consumers, are the benefits of tapping to pay for purchases (over carrying and using a payment card) enough to make them give up their latest high-tech phones for these generic looking ones? Also, how many retailers will allow them to use these devices to pay?

2) For the retailers, are there going to be enough phone-totting customers to justify getting (and paying for) a new machine just to accept this new payment? Remember that even given the widespread use of EZLink cards, hardly any merchants bother to uses it as a form of payment.

Seems like a classic chicken and egg problem to me.

Somehow, this reminds me of the era when cashcards were predicted to bring us into a new cashless world.

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