We first saw the budget-friendly Lumia 610 at MWC earlier this year and now, Nokia is confirming that it will be launching an NFC version.
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The Lumia 610 NFC will launch on Orange in Europe initially and will be compatible with both MasterCard — PayPass — and VISA — payWave — mobile payment systems. This will allow shoppers with compatible bank accounts to use their Lumia 610 NFC phones to tap-to-pay in stores with NFC-enabled registers.
Lumia 610 NFC owners can also make use of Nokia’s long-touted NFC-enabled accessories.
It’s interesting to note that Windows Phone doesn’t support NFC natively yet. The NFC implementation on the Lumia 610 NFC is Nokia’s own concoction.
No pricing has been confirmed, but the Lumia 610 without NFC retails for around US$254 and houses an 800Mhz Qualcomm CPU with 256MB RAM and 8GB of non-expandable memory, beneath a WVGA LCD display.
The NFC version is scheduled to arrive in the third quarter of this year.
