iPhone 6 Release Date Rumors: Apple’s Next Device To Have NFC Feature

If Apple’s latest patent filing is any indication, it could be that the company is finally considering adding smartphone payments with NFC feature on the iOS integration. It would make sense for the company to take this step seeing how almost every smartphone from Android, Blackberry, Windows has this feature. Geek reports that the biggest issue that Apple has with adding the technology to their smartphones is that no one can justify the technology to users.

There are two recently discovered patents showing NFC transactions for iOS and iPhones. The first patent is for iTunes gifting via NFC and was discovered last year. The general idea behind this feature is a user could tap your phone to someone else’s phone and gift them a song, movie, app or game. The second patent covers mobile payments. Simply put it’s where NFC is used as a kind of handshake with a payment terminal and then switches to another wireless system to complete a transaction.

While most patents never lead anywhere this could be an indication that Apple is planning this feature for their upcoming smartphone. If this next phone is indeed the iPhone 6, it could be possible there will be an updated hardware design that could support an NFC chip. Alternatively, this could be aimed at the all plastic “C” line of iPhones that were announced last year. That possibility seems more likely as the plastic shell makes it easy to transmit things like NFC, where the metal S5 design could complicate transactions.