Google Wallet continues on its slow (but exciting) march toward letting you pay for things simply by tapping your phone against a special, NFC-enabled credit card reader. Today, in a post on Google’s Official Blog, the wallet team announced that it’s rolling out support for SingleTap — a new feature that lets you both pay and redeem coupons at a given retailer, without having to clip (or print out) and paper coupons. Instead, the phone ‘remembers’ the Offers you’ve saved or purchased, and redeems them automatically.
The feature was first demoed back when Wallet was unveiled in May, but when the service launched in beta last month you could only use it for payments, not offers. Of course, Google Wallet is still only available to consumers that have the Sprint Nexus S 4G (not even the T-Mobile or AT&T variants of the Nexus S work). But that will hopefully change soon — I won’t be surprised if we see some announcements around this at the Android event in Hong Kong this week.
Google’s post also notes that the interface for the Google pre-paid credit card — which lets you preload a virtual card with money, in case your credit card isn’t natively supported by Wallet — will now feature more details about each of your transactions.
And finally, Google Wallet has landed some new retailers that will be integrating the service soon, including: Chevron, D’Agostino, Faber News Now, Gristedes Supermarkets and Pinkberry, who join American Eagle, Macy’s, Jamba Juice, and more (you can see a full listing of the partners here).
From the post:
The Offers tab in Google Wallet has been updated to include a new “Featured Offers” section with discounts that are exclusive to Google Wallet. Today, these include 15% off at American Eagle Outfitters, 10% off at The Container Store, 15% off at Macy’s and an all-fruit smoothie for $2 at Jamba Juice. There are many more Google Wallet exclusive discounts to come, and you can save your favorites in Google Wallet so they’ll be automatically applied to your bill when you check out.
Organizing loyalty cards in your wallet is getting easier too. Today, Foot Locker, Guess, OfficeMax and American Eagle Outfitters are providing loyalty cards for Google Wallet so you can rack up reward points automatically as you shop. More of these are on the way.