nsane.forums Posted November 20, 2013 Share Posted November 20, 2013 Google revives the Wallet Card, but as a much more limited product.The physical Google Wallet Card is back—sort of. The new version of the Wallet Card is basically a debit card for a Google Wallet account. This works much like a PayPal account, which is just an online money bucket that users can directly deposit to and withdraw from. The Wallet Card will let you make swipe-able purchases with money from this account.The cancelled version of the Google-issued credit card that was originally leaked last year was much more exciting. It was meant to bring the benefits of Google Wallet into the non-NFC-equipped world. Through a lot of backend credit card trickery, Google was going to create a single, unifying piece of plastic for all your other credit cards. The Google Wallet Card was not a standalone credit card; it would "forward" the charge onto one of your real credit cards. The real card that would be charged was selectable via the Google Wallet app. A report by AllThingsD last May indicated that Google had cancelled the Wallet Card after the head of the Wallet team left Google. It appears, however, that rather than scrap the whole project, Google is now releasing a much more limited version.The AllThingsD report mentioned that one of the reasons for the Wallet Card cancellation (besides the team leader leaving) was that Larry Page felt the Wallet Card wasn't ambitious enough. This new version of the card is even less ambitious, though—it's just another debit card, only from the Bank of Google. Since it only withdraws from a Google Wallet balance, it will only really be of use to people who frequently receive deposits into their Wallet account, which is mostly Android app developers or users who transfer money through Wallet. The cancelled, unifying Wallet Card was a great idea that regular people were excited about—so much so that a startup called "Coin" basically copied the concept a year later, built a $50 card, and received 10,000 pre-orders in the first 40 minutes.The new, limited Wallet card is just another chapter in the rocky life that Wallet has so far endured. It has had to deal with slow adoption of NFC in smartphones, limited installations of NFC terminals, key employees leaving, and carriers trying to block Wallet at every turn in favor of their in-house solution, ISIS. There has been a bit of good news lately, though. With KitKat, Google Wallet no longer relies on the carrier-controlled secure element in the NFC chip. Now any NFC phone with KitKat can grab Wallet from the Play Store and start purchasing—carriers are unable to control or block it.The Wallet card is available today, for free, from wallet.google.com. Google says there are no annual or monthly fees, and right now shipping takes about 10-12 days.View: Original Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pintas Posted November 21, 2013 Share Posted November 21, 2013 The logo looks like the deceased Google Wave. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
geeteam Posted November 21, 2013 Share Posted November 21, 2013 looks cool Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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