By Lauren Aaronson

Popular Science

Friday, July 28, 2006; Posted: 4:06 p.m. EDT (20:06 GMT)

A tiny add-on chip will turn your cell phone into a credit card, bus schedule, concert ticket and more.

(PopSci.com) -- Forgot your wallet? You`ll need a better excuse than that for passing on the check. By next year, you`ll be able to pay simply by swiping your cell phone a few inches from a cash register, with a new wireless standard called Near Field Communication.

An NFC chip in your phone will send your credit-card number -- stored on your phone or on the chip -- by way of short-distance radio waves.

An electronic reader at the checkout will decode the number and ring up your purchase. Unlike radio-frequency identification (RFID) and other existing contactless payment systems, NFC chips allow two-way information exchange by rolling an RF transmitter and reader into one five-millimeter package.

That means the chip can also take in data, such as a receipt zapped to it by a cash register or a bus schedule from a tag embedded in a bus-stop sign.

You don`t even have to buy a new phone. When it hits stores next spring, the miniSD-card-size adapter from SanDisk can add NFC to any smartphone with a Symbian operating system when it hits stores next spring.

The first pay-by-phone option should roll out later this year, with more applications to follow.