Interactive wireless transaction device using consumer smartphone/PDA (02-Nov-2009)

Interactive wireless transaction device using consumer smartphone /PDA

In a typical Point of Sale (POS) environment, the POS "system" is composed of hardware owned/controlled by the retailer. There have also been instances of payment authorizations systems being built that utilize a customer's handphone/PDA device for use as a payment authorization device. These implementations typically utilize some type of near field communications (NFC) mechanism, but the retailer has no control over what appears on the customer display. That is controlled by the entity controlling the software in the phone.

Several new technologies have made a completely new POS implementation practical and reasonable. Wireless USB technology is a wireless implementation of standard USB technology. There also now exists a class of new display adapters called "virtual graphics display". These displays appear to the system as a real graphics adapter that honors all of the graphics API calls that a program can make, but the implementation of that display is in software, and can be then handled in many non-traditional manners.

Of particular interest is a type of virtual graphics display adapter based on USB technology. These types of adapter provide a "virtual graphics display" system interface to the software, but allow for the actual graphics device to be located remotely from the system unit at the other end of a USB cable. When combined with a wireless...