This is a discussion thread for the "Rumor: New iPhone to Have NFC for Mobile Payments" story posted on the front page.
It's actually not disabled. The reason you see it the way you do is because when it first starts up it looks for any applications with Passbook coded into it and since they're are abviously none, it just shows you the page it does. You can test some though. It's actually really easy to code for it.
I posted this 13 days ago in the How to Upgrade to iOS6 without UDID thread. It seemed obvious to me at the time, and I thought it should be obvious to to everyone else too.
This is a little frightening. If someone steals your phone it would be way easy for them to wrack up fraudulent charges.
The same applies if someone stole your credit card. There will naturally be security in place. NFC is nice for lots of other stuff too though if you don't feel like using it for payments.
There is got to be an iOS app called Passbook Exchange, or something like that, remember Facebook Exchange and Phonebook Exchange?
It's actually called Passbooks as the people above said and I know that for fact because I have tried IOS 6 beta 1, 2 & 3
