Near field communication (NFC) is one of the hottest new features in the mobile phone industry. It allows a phone to become a virtual wallet. Interacting with your location, stores, and finances, if done right, it could add a huge advantage to your everyday life. With this latest rumor, that’s what Apple is planning on doing.

According to 9to5mac, the next generation iPhone is going to feature NFC technology. It will allow you to make payments to vendors directly from your phone. This comes after digging into code within previous iPhone models. 9to5mac had the following to say on the issue:

“Further investigation into this hardware code dump leads us to believe that these iPhones also have Near Field Communication (NFC) controllers directly connected to the power management unit (PMU)….NFC would also allow iPhone users a quick and easy way to share files from one iOS device to another.”

I don’t know about you, but I’d be extremely happy to see this come to the next iPhone. Passbook in and of itself is a great idea, but to add NFC would make it huge competition for Google and Microsoft. Not to mention how Passbook uses your GPS location to see if you’re near any stores that you have saved cards for in your Passbook. All I can say is that I can’t wait to see what’s gonna happen this fall.

What do you guys think? Is NFC on your iPhone wish-list? Or is there something you want more, aside from a bigger screen?

Via: 9to5mac   Image: CNET