8 
Passbook is a new mobile wallet from Apple that will debut in iOS. Right now it’s not about payments, it’s about ticket aggregation, but it’s a sign of things to come. Currently, it allows you to combine your tickets and loyalty cards into one convenient place. It’s intuitive, and pretty spectacular.
Example 1: You buy movie tickets online. You show up at the theatre. Rather than fumble around for your pass, your phone’s GPS senses that you’ve arrived, and your electronic ticket pops up on your phone automatically, ready to be scanned.
Example 2: You’re going to the airport. You’ve checked in already via your phone. Passbook is scanned as you go through security. Oh no, your gate has been changed. Passbook will let you know of the change instantly, in real time, from within the app. Very nice.
You can use it to pay for stuff, like with your Starbucks card, but this is just the beginning. It currently uses QR-codes (seriously!?) for a lot of the scanning, but we think this is a good indicator that NFC will be coming to the next iPhone. We shall see. Apple will be releasing the API so developers can utilise this, which is, of course, critical for it to take off. Just judging by our first glimpse, it looks pretty excellent.
Catch up on all of Apple’s WWDC announcements here
Well at least the iPhone battery is so good that having GPS on constantly won’t have a noticeable effect and we won’t have to constantly have it on charge…
By the way, I was being sarcastic.
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/watch-out-we-got-a-badass-over-here-meme.png
http://youtu.be/L_mrNQBLSMU
I can’t think that any phone would fair well with this on. I agree though …it’ll kane your battery! I expect it’ll pop on every other minute to get a fix then turn off again to conserve the battery.
Seemed pretty constant with location-based reminders, though…
Jamie, looks like the Simpsons reference went over your head there buddy.
That’s true. I don’t tend to use them that often so I can’t say I’ve noticed it …this calls for an experiment!
You were being ironic, not sarcastic…. And I never have any problem with my iPhone battery!
Going off the amount of patents Apple has filed and won in regards to payment methods recently, (source – http://www.patentlyapple.com, ) and combined with this Passbook announcement for iOS 6 – i’m going to take a guess that this is the first step towards their “iWallet” thing, with them including a NFC chip in the iPhone 5, just search for iWallet or NFC and see for yourself.
note to self, read article fully before posting comment…
I can see it will be very convenient for a normal customer, with the needs to carry the emails/printed vouchers around. I tried some passes on passfu.com . They are quite useful.