Oyster on mobiles
Building Oyster technology into mobile phones seems like a good idea. Just about everyone is permanently wedded to their phone. However, I have a couple of slight issues with it. Just about everyone also always carries their wallet or purse and an Oyster card - the size of a normal credit card - is hardly an onerous burden.
I ask myself cui bono - who benefits? It’s a nice piece of technology, but hardly a priority. Part of the answer lies in the OneTouch card from Barclays, which combines a credit card, Visa PayWave and Oyster.
So far as I can tell, PayWave is only available if you take the credit card. I neither have nor want a credit card; I’m not the only one. Equally, there’ll be people who don’t qualify for the credit card. The only way to obtain this (clever and useful) card is to use, in some fashion, Barclays. In fairness to Barclays, there were the UK pioneers of credit cards. However, it took a few years for competition to emerge.
Adding or modifying a chip in a card is not a big deal. Adding it, however, to a mobile phone is a potentially more difficult task. Not insuperable, but not negligible. I’m not an expert, but shielding the RFID chip from the signals put out by mobiles will be an issue. At a guess, mobile phone manufacturers will have to work out the technology themselves so that it works with existing infrastructure rather than doing any retrofitting to Oyster readers.
The pay-off will be people wanting to buy Oyster-enabled phones. I’ll be interested to see what the difference in cost will be and how many manufacturers offer the facility and whether there will be specific models that you can only buy with the capacity to use Oyster.
I’m a big fan of the Oyster card, which is Transport for London’s contactless ticket. Aside from the near-automatic appeal of technology to the geeky part of my soul, it allows for better ticket pricing options and speeds up boarding buses and tubes. The latter is obvious; instead of the bus driver having to fiddle with change, you just swipe your Oyster. If you go to South Kensington tube, the station nearest the V&A, Natural History and Science Museums as well as the Albert Hall and other attractions, you will notice the delay; lots of tourists using paper tickets take time to go through the barriers.
xD.
September 26th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Tigger and I travel a lot. We have been to Waterloo (Belgium), Paris, Glasgow, Coventry and York within a few weeks. Having no car, we go everywhere by public transport. There is no doubt that where electronic Oyster-like ticketing exists, it makes for quicker service.
Paris has a strange system on the bus whereby if you have a paper ticket (or have just bought it from the driver), you insert it in a machine which sucks it in, prints on it and spits it out again. This takes some of the wait out of boarding but isn’t as fast as an Oyster.
I don’t like combined function cards. I wouldn’t get the Barclay one. What if I wanted to lend Tigger my Oyster? She would have to have my credit card as well.
The same with mobiles: who wants to keep whacking their mobile against the Oyster reader on buses and tubes?
The reason for it is obvious to me: so many products have reached market saturation and therefore sell very few units, just what people need to upgrade or replace lost, stolen or damaged items. So the manufacturers invent new functions to persuade us we all need the new product. We don’t.
Plenty of people fall for this, of course, enough to ensure that manufacturers will keep on doing it.
One of these days someone will come up with an Oyster card that does email.
September 26th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Good point, ST - I hadn’t thought about the market saturation point.
Ostrava and Prague have the same system of putting the ticket in a validator. To encourage people not to slow things down, tickets are more expensive if bought from the driver.
I have to confess that my phone does email, so if it ever acquired Blackberry functionality, it would fulfill your prediction…
xD.