Rumors have been floating around for a while now that Visa and Samsung had something special planned for the Olympic Games next year. With about ten months left before the games kick off in London, Visa has formally confirmed that they are building a special phone for the Olympics and that it will, in fact, have an NFC chip.
Pocket Lint confirmed the phone with Sandra Alzetta, Visa Europe’s head of innovation and new product development, at the Visa Europe Security Summit in Frankfurt, Germany. She added that the phone will be “iconic,” and packed full of special Olympics content. As far as availability goes, the phone should be on shelves globally before, during, and after the Olympic games.
Visa also confirmed that there will be “almost 160,000 terminals in Europe, including the 70,000 shops, bars, and restaurants in the UK,” all of which will work with this special new “Olympics phone.” And it gets better — there’s also been talk of NFC-equipped microSD cards, which could theoretically turn any phone (save for the iPhone, of course) into an NFC-capable device. However, it hasn’t been specified whether or not those microSDs will be available for the Olympics or are just another cool thing coming down the pipeline.
Sounds good, yes? And if the rest of its specs are anything close to what we’re (hopefully) seeing on the Samsung Galaxy Prime, the “Olympics phone” certainly looks like a winner.