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To be honest, my Nexus 5 is the first device that is good (to me) right out of the box.

I've installed Cyanogenmod on every Android device before and Cydia on my first iOS device (my first smartphone was an iPhone 3GS).

The clerk you are talking about, will still not know what NFC is for payments in a year from now. It doesn't change anything that Apple now joined the same game with Apple Pay... It's more infrastructure related and demand related.

Just like the Apple Watch, there is no actual demand for NFC Payments from regular users.

There was demand for the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Also Maps applications are used a lot (Navigation).

We don't use watches anymore (check your smartphone), we still pay with our wallet and with cash.

For the ones that think a wallet isn't required anymore because of Apple Pay. How are you going to transfer money to your friend (with any other device or without a smartphone), with a transfer rate of 0% without cash?

If that problem is solved, there can be a future for a walletless life.

Venmo.

In fact, in young circles (in the US), this seems to have become the defacto way of transferring money socially between individuals. I don't think I have paid someone I know with physical cash in years.

It costs you guys money to make bank transfers? Wow. For the record, I can send and receive money (for free) from my phone only needing the other person's phone number at this point. (Australian. Also, I've never used the pay-to-phone stuff because I just prefer to use their account number. I can do that for free from my phone too.)

It strikes me that our NFC infrastructure is way better than yours too. Somewhat a reverse of most patterns in tech-infrastructure. It's just a pity Google won't support the Nexus' NFC capabilities in Australia - I bet Apple will.

The banking system in the US is terrible and stuck in the stone age.

Squarecash, free and works over email so anything that can do email can do it.

Any number of services support ths - I believe Wallet, Venmo, Paypal and Square all offer some form of fee-less peer-to-peer transfer, because it has such a high value for organic growth as people send money to friends.

And/or because it's a nice chunk of data to add to the social graph.

"We don't use watches anymore (check your smartphone), we still pay with our wallet and with cash."

When I was living in the UK about 70% of my purchases were done with a chip and pin card, even a couple of beers at a pub.

This because in the end it was quicker and easier than using cash.

If NFC makes paying quicker and easier than using cash or cards, the demand will be there: by the end of the month there will be millions of iPhone6 customers waiting to test these new features.

If I were a shop/chain owner, I would be scrambling to try to please them, before the competition does.

Here in Canada, we have "contactless" payments on the major credit and debit cards. When it's time to pay, you just tap your card on the reader and it's done().
NFC payments using a phone would add a few more steps, so I think that the wallet and card is going to win out for me. It would be very hard to get it much simpler than it is right now.

() There are limits. My MasterCard, for example, will let me make contactless payments up to a total of $50. At that point it will require me to make a Chip&Pin transaction in order to reset the $50. When this happens the reader will just say "Insert Chip" or something.

Contactless is supported in the UK as well (usually up to a £20 minimum), but isn't nearly as widely supported as chip +pin, and I certainly don't know anyone who uses it regularly.

Once more supermarkets roll it out (I'm looking at you, Sainsburys), it'll start to get proper traction and kick on to being regular thing.

Also, it's often difficult to see whether a retailer has contactless even when you're standing Right There and then you do the normal chip+pin out of shame because you feel like a right fool with your card out.

I'm going out with some friends, everyone brings in 10 € into the shared "wallet".. (1 guy has an old Nokia, the rest is shared between Android, iPhone and Windows Phone). One guy has no wallet and only has Apple pay .

Next time he goes out with them, he will have his wallet. To give back the money he borrowed from his friends.

When the above situation can be handled.. There is an option for a walletless life. Where i live (Belgium), this won't happen within the next 2 years

>he will have his wallet.

The vast majority of men in the US will have their wallets with them regardless. The iPhone 6 will not, and is not designed to replace driver's license, etc.

I think that should be the whole point, seeming that without use of the wallet, there is no use for cash anymore.

Supposedly the lack of updates for the Galaxy Nexus was down to the TI CPU they used. TI stopped working on mobile SoCs shortly after the Galaxy Nexus was released, so they no longer supported it and wouldn't provide any updated firmware needed for newer Android versions. The Verizon version was worse still for updates, but that's little surprise.

Either way, you're comparing 2 year old phones. I also got tired of fighting with Android and installing custom builds, but it's not really necessary these days. Stock builds are much more polished, and many of the more advanced features from OEM and custom builds have been integrated into stock Android. I recently got a HTC One and have found little need to root or install any custom ROMs on it - it does everything I need and doesn't seem worth the hassle any more.

I do agree with what you say about Google not "finishing the job". Many apps and services have been released with a lot of promise, but then been left relatively unchanged from early versions. If Apple Pay succeeds where Google Wallet has failed to gain traction, it will almost certainly be down to Apple making more of an effort to get merchants and services to support it. Perhaps they simly have more influence, but Google isn't exactly a small company, yet they often seem to fail in these areas. In particular, they make little effort to support things (Google Wallet NFC payments is one example) outside of the US. They're an international company, they have offices in many other countries, and yet many of their services remain US only, or take at least a year to be offered elsewhere.

It's relatively easy to update a gnex on your own, though[1]. I've spend maybe two hours keeping it up to date over the last ~3 years. Yeah, it would be awesome if that wasn't necessary, but in balance the benefits I get outweigh that inconvenience.

Having control over your own phone is a genuinely useful thing, not some abstract ideal. I've been using a wireless tether with a Verizon unlimited data plan for the last 5 years, something I simply couldn't have done with an iPhone. (And it's amazing how many hassles that removes -- I can get internet in the park, or in any shop no matter how shitty the wifi.)

1. I use this ROM: rootzwiki.com/topic/36706-romaosp62114-shiny-rom-ota-like-stock-android-444-ktu84p/#entry1031982

I was an Android early adopter T-Mobile G1/G2, then a Windows Phone, then iPhone. It's true though, it is easy to update your own ROM, I have an HP Touchpad I run android on.

I have all the control over my phone I desire to have, it does everything I could never need it to, I don't have to worry about my own ROM, or if updates to the system come, I press the update button when the phone tells me to do so, in short, I have the phone-appliance, a construct I am supremely happy with.

Apple products only have three errors (in order of likelihood):

1) You did it wrong. 2) It doesn't do that. 3) and rarely, It's an honest to god bug.

95% of the problems I've ever had with my phone are fixed by turning it off, and turning it on again - this ease of use led me to buy a Mac, another choice I'm quite happy with, it all more or less just works - and with the Mac I have enough freedom to replace the built in apps that don't work with ones that do - Chrome/Thunderbird/Adium instead of Safari, Mail.app and iMessage.

The Galaxy Nexus had a chipset that had been orphaned by TI (due to their total withdrawal from the industry), so Google kind of got the short end of the stick with that one.

That's short-term balance-sheet thinking. Which isn't a terrible way to make business decisions, but it definitely isn't the kind of thing that builds long-term consumer trust. There's a reason that Apple has tight supplier relationships and even makes a lot of their own chips: having committed to long-term value delivery, they work backward to make sure they can do that efficiently.

That's an often bandied about excuse, but actually completely wrong - TI has continued to support existing customers and not only did Google go on to use an OMAP4 in Google Glass, but the Moto360 actually uses an OMAP3.

Google simply stopped supporting the Galaxy Nexus because they didn't feel like it.

The new types of Linux desktops put me off (abandonment of typical desktop window management paradigms, removal of options), and I therefore stick with a Fedora 12 (!) VM running GNOME2 to write any Linux code on.

I too have the same problem with NFC, apart from here in the UK no Android payment systems are ready on the phone itself (you can only install it on some devices).

Modern linux desktops are in a worse state than they were in ~2006.

And yes google are terrible at sending clear messages.

Just look at yesterdays confusing discussion RE hangouts/gchat/gtalk/google voice.

No idea what is going on there.

Which message was that? I am still using GTalk on my phone (Android 4.1, no updates in site, such a relic of a phone to be two years old right? Xperia S - 32GB of storage and a decent camera, so why no updates? It's STUPID)

I notice that people attempting to communicate via Hangouts (on their phone?) doesn't notify me in Talk. If I attempt to call someone who has Talk on their phone from my web browser (therefore using Hangouts), they never get any notification. I can therefore never get in touch with my brother, unless I call him using Talk from my phone. If someone attempts to talk to me via Hangouts, the message is shown in my inbox in the web interface, but NOT on my phone in GMail, nor in Talk on my phone. I therefore never find out about a message until I use the web interface, which I don't really do because I have GMail on my phone......

It's a bit broken.

Just use Linux Mint w/Cinnamon. It feels like Windows 7 done right, and works almost great on Asus ultrabooks (they've broken something about battery life in Qiana).

I also dislike the newer Linux desktop environments like Unity and Gnome 3, but XFCE, Cinnamon, and Mate are all an improvement over Gnome 2.

Agreed about NFC, it's frustrating that I've had NFC on my phone for 2 years now, but still not been able to use it for payments. EE does have an NFC payment service now, but for some reason they only let you use it on a few specific phones, not including my HTC. I'm not sure if this is down to differences in the hardware or just favouritism. I'm hoping that Apple Pay will at least push more places and services to support NFC payments in general.

Linux Mate is gnome2. I, like you, stuck with an older fedora for a long time, and I'm typing this here now on a F20-Mate install.

Is F20 alright? Are things mostly working on it? I only ask because I have memories of my upgrades from FC1 to FC2 to FC4, to FC7 to FC10 to FC12 and things ALWAYS broke between them.