Google and Samsung have announced a new NFC smartphone, the Galaxy Nexus, running on the latest version of the Android OS as well as introducing Android Beam which uses NFC technology to share content between handsets. The two companies put an emphasis in their Android Beam announcement on using NFC for sharing content such as webpages, video, maps and apps by tapping phones together yet made no mention of the possibility of P2P payments via the new service. Google recently launched its mobile wallet which is currently only available on a single, Samsung-supplied handset.  Google Wallet is designed for mobile payments between a user and a retailer rather than between two individuals (the kind of thing envisaged for content by Android Beam) but it still appears surprising Google and Samsung made no mention of mobile payments in their announcement. Other mobile money players including PayPal (otherwise a sceptic on NFC) have shown off the P2P payment capabilities of the technology.  

Samsung’s newly announced Galaxy Nexus is the first smartphone based on the latest version of the Android OS called Ice Cream Sandwich, also known as Android 4.0. In addition to NFC, the new version of the OS also includes a “desktop-class” browser which is faster than the existing one as well as the ability to sync bookmarks with Google Chrome. There are also updates to mobile Gmail and the Google Calendar. It also has a feature called Face Unlock, a facial recognition technology for unlocking the phone. The new handset was originally due to be announced one week ago but was delayed out of respect following the death of Steve Jobs.