Report : Apple Plans New IPhone Model With Sony's FeliCa Chip

(RTTNews) - Apple Inc. (AAPL) is planning a new iPhone feature for Japan that will enable users to pay for mass-transit rides with their smartphones instead of physical payment cards. A future iPhone will include technology called FeliCa, a mobile tap-to-pay standard in Japan developed by Sony Corp. (SON.L, SNE), Bloomberg reported quoting people familiar with the matter.

The FeliCa chip will let customers in Japan store their public bus and train passes on their iPhones. Users would then be able to tap their phones against the entrance scanners instead of using physical cards. While the FeliCa chip is the standard technology underlying the service, there are several different providers of transit payment cards based on the type of transit and areas within Japan.

The report noted that Apple intends to work with multiple transit card providers. The major players there include the Suica and Pasmo networks. Theoretically, virtual representations of the transit passes would be stored in the iPhone's Wallet application. The card companies sell access to transit services both as-needed and via monthly packages.

Apple has planned to launch these new features with the next iPhone models, which the company is set to unveil in September. However, the company could hold back the transit card feature to next year's model if discussions with the Japan-based payment networks fall apart. Apple is already at work on a major redesign of the iPhone for 2017 that focuses more heavily on the display by removing the Home button.