i have a nokia n95 running symbian 60 -am amazed how fast mobile tech has evolved in the last 3 yrs ..its got 3G with full unlimted internet access at a flat rate with no d/l limitations ,wlan, GPS and 5Mp camera all in one unit ( battery life is the downside)

i’m sure phones are going to converge even more & likely to become the payment device of choice once authentication and security are resolved properly eg some kind of biometrics integrated on board rather than pin access… its going to be interesting where and how fast this technology moves ..after all… all mobiles have a smartcard in all phones called a sim – whose the going to be the first bank/telco to integrate EMV /sim with biometrics & how far are we off 10 yrs, 5 yrs , 3yrs

… a digital camera in a phone isnt a million miles away from a basic fingerprint reader or a barcode reader … makes you wonder…

i can mobile bank now on nearly any bank site as im using the webbrowser – not a great experience – but thats more down to site design than the phone…only because it was designed around pc access not mobile access

However I also agree that while huge, it may remain niche.

For one the iPhone is priced very steeply and offered (for now) with a very limited set of telcos (though that may change in the future). It therefore will have a much lower penetration that that of a simple PC connected to a broadband connection. Given this it remains to be seen how many would find it worthwhile to build solutions for its specific capabilities.

Secondly there are already mobile banking solutions that work with existing J2ME enabled phones or even simpler solutions based on SMS/ WAP. And all of these are doing quite well giving people what the need while they’re on the move. Not sure how many folks would want to, say, do something like looking at a deposit modeling scenario and then open a deposit, while sitting at the airport lounge and twiddling on their iPhone.

Unless iPhone moves away from being a very niche product and becomes a more generally accepted platform, with all the nice things that Apple has built being on offer to any hand phone maker/ telco. Somehow, don’t see this happening.