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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

Samsung Electronics is the latest­–and largest–smartphone maker to introduce its own branded NFC tags, with its launch of TecTiles programmable tags.

Fifty passengers at French regional airport Toulouse-Blagnac will test an application that puts a security pass to access airport facilities on SIM cards in BlackBerry NFC phones.

Samsung Electronics and NXP Semiconductors have confirmed that Samsung’s next flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S III, will sport an embedded secure chip, in addition to supporting applications on SIM cards.

Samsung Electronics is gearing up to jump into the mobile-payment market–with plans to offer a payments service from its NFC-enabled smartphones, NFC Times has learned.

Samsung today announced two new Android phones for its Galaxy line that support NFC as an option. 

With the help of NFC technology, airline passengers will routinely tap their mobile phones to pass through security checkpoints and boarding gates by 2018, predicts major airline industry IT and communications services provider SITA.

Japan’s second largest mobile operator, KDDI, said it would launch Japan’s first mobile NFC service late this month with the Samsung Galaxy S II–though the service will start out small because of the lack of phones that support both standard NFC and Japan's proprietary FeliCa technology, as well as Japan's nearly nonexistent infrastructure of standard contactless readers.

The trial, scheduled to last three months, will enable a combined 44 employees from Vodafone an

Vodafone New Zealand and Bank of New Zealand have launched an employee trial of NFC payment using the Samsung Galaxy S II.

Samsung Electronics predicts the release of the NFC version of its flagship Galaxy S II next month will boost the popularity of the technology in various markets, said Hankil Yoon, vice president for product strategy in Samsung's mobile communications division.