London: Apple’s new Passbook app for iOS6 will turn a users’ iPhone in to an ‘electronic wallet’ by storing cards, airport boarding passes, and movie tickets.
The new app, unveiled at the firm’s WWDC developer conference, is a user-friendly holder for electronic tickets, passes and vouchers, all of which use barcodes on-screen.
The iPhone will detect if you're at the airport, for instance, and fish out the relevant electronic documents, The Telegraph reports.
“Passbook takes all of these passes and combines them together in one place, and integrates it right into the OS, and they are beautiful,” Scott Forstall, the man in charge of iOS and tipped as future leader of Apple, said.
According to the paper, observers, however, said such examples are merely a prelude to Passbook and the next iPhone acting as a fully-fledged electronic wallet, probably with “wave and pay” technology built in.
Meanwhile, Apple’s main smartphone manufacturing rival, Samsung, has already included the necessary hardware, a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip, into its latest Galaxy S3.
In the US Google is promoting its own app and in-store system to enable consumers to pay by waving their smartphone at the till, Google Wallet.
ANI
First Published: Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 15:18