Remember Coin, the card that promised to put all your credit cards on one handy chunk of plastic, and then suffered from substantial setbacks that may make it useless by the time it comes out? Well now it has a competitor. This is Plastc, another upcoming supercard with some seriously big promises that will be even harder to keep.
Plastc fits pretty squarely into the established supercard genre: it’s designed to use Bluetooth to pair with an app on your phone, essentially holding the information of up to 20 cards in a single 0.8mm slab, and letting you choose between them at will.
But that’s not all! While Coin’s delays have shown that this is a little more difficult than it sounds, Plastc is still shooting for the stars. It promises not only the card thing, but also an e-ink touchscreen, NFC, RFID (so it can do things like trigger an office badge-reader), a 30-day battery life and wireless charging. And to stave off concerns that the upcoming switch to chip and pin will render it completely obsolete, Plastc also claims to include an EMV chip in addition to optional security measures like the ability to lock all your cards behind a PIN, phone alerts when you’ve left your card behind, or remote wipe if you’ve lost it for good.
Sound great? Of course it does! Almost too good to be real; that is a lot of tech to squeeze into one, tiny, credit card-sized device. The dream is enticing, but we’ll have to wait a while to see if it will come true. Plastc is set for a mid-2015 release, although the (absurdly) trusting can plunk down $US155 for a pre-order today, sight unseen. Of course, by the time it shows up — if it shows up at all — we may have all ditched our wallets for our phones anyways. [Plastc]