Obviously 90% of the time a phone could be used (though I don't agree it's faster than credit card tap, roughly the same speed) and a card can be used as backup, but it makes ditching a credit card completely not really an option.

If your social circle is anything like mine, it's not some person, it's always one, as in a single person who disproportionately is incapable of maintaining their phone. For the majority of people they're very reliable devices, so this is less "everyone will be inconvenienced sometimes" and more "a few people will be inconvenienced a lot". I recognize that it's still an issue, but those people can keep using cards while the rest of us benefit from tap-to-pay being the preferable option a majority of the time.

I thought "maybe the mayor is speaking to the media" and walked over. Turns out the crowd was people charging their phone from the truck. CNN generously left the truck running there for a couple of days.

If you lose your phone you just fall back to the physical card that you presumably have in your wallet somewhere.

If your phone is almost out of juice, you can order an Uber. But if your battery is flat, you can always ask the cabby if they take cards (or just withdraw cash using your card if you're in a city where most of the cabs don't).

Man, I love Uber. Or at least the idea.

Fight the power! Stick it to the man!

If one believes that a proposed-but-currently-illegal behavior is beneficial to society, the technically correct way to go about rectifying the situation is to discuss with your local democratic representatives, who can take the issue back to the legislative chamber and work to correct the law. Admittedly, that's pretty impractical at this point.

The taxi driver is just trying to reduce his costs; he could allow riders to negotiate cheaper prices, benefiting everyone.

Given credit card companies have legal means to pay less percentage tax on much more income than the cab driver and suck money out of taxpayers' pockets in many other ways, I'd offer that screwing over the credit card company might benefit the rest of taxpayers more than the cabbie paying tax does.

I really like cash.

It can be stolen easily. You have to go somewhere to get more of it. You have to make change. It doesn't allow you to automatically track your purchases. You can't get it back from a seller if you are sold fraudulent goods.

Edit: Thought about getting the $50 version, but I'm not quite that frugal.

Second Edit: You probably need NFC for this huh? Drat.

Wow. Not a comment about you in particular, but about the industry in general. I did a quick search and found this: http://bluproducts.com/android-phones

Really? 66 different phones? Is this entire industry, except for Apple, run by imbeciles? Not that I'm in the target demographic, but I only have a relatively few years left on this earth. I don't want to spend half of them just figuring out the differences between Android phones!

Hasn't the rest of the world learned anything from St. Steven?

Out of curiosity, I went to find out how many variants Apple is currently selling[1] (model, color, storage). I counted 42 distinct combinations you could possibly choose! I guess not even Apple learned from 'St. Steven', or he was wrong.

Removing the color axis whittles down the model/memory combination to a more manageable 12 options - but the point remains.

1. http://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/

BLU is a usually-cheap phone brand, with handsets starting around 60USD.

The magnet isn't damaging the phone — at least not at field strengths likely to be encountered in everyday life. Removing the magnetic field should immediately turn the screen back on.