MONACO – Nokia, in a surprise move, announced it will introduce its first NFC-enabled Windows Phone device in the third quarter, offering an NFC version of its low-cost Lumia 610.
The phone will be sold first by France Telecom-Orange and will support payment on SIM cards, along with other NFC features, such as tag reading. In an announcement today at the WIMA 2012 conference in Monaco, Nokia and Orange said both MasterCard Worldwide and Visa had certified the device to run their respective contactless applications.
Nokia had been expected to wait until Microsoft releases the next version of its mobile operating system, Windows Phone 8, which will have full NFC functionality built-in.