There's really an enormous amount of hype around NFC, and the fact is that the readers are still really expensive. We've been operating on the assumption that b

There's really an enormous amount of hype around NFC, and the fact is that the readers are still really expensive. We've been operating on the assumption that barcodes will prevail because they're about 10X cheaper to read, and the recent Starbucks nationwide rollout of barcode-based mobile payments supports that. Also unless I'm missing something the Android 2.3 NFC spec is pretty incomplete. It lets you read an NFC tag with a phone but not broadcast as though your phone were a tag. This means that you can't really do mobile payments after all (again, I might be missing something obvious, but I don't think so). Hopefully if this really is an omission it will get resolved with the next release of Android. For now there's not a whole lot we can do with it. Anyway, NFC is great, but in reality scanning a barcode isn't that much harder or faster, and it's certainly cheaper--it's been working at grocery stores for years.