PayPal Mobile Officially Launches
Very cool - as you've probably read, PayPal Mobile officially launched today. I got a little preview it was coming on Monday when Ashley handed off a spanky new PayPal Mobile t-shirt to me at MoMo, despite me having helped pre-announce the product (hey, it was already on Engadget when I wrote about it!). Thanks Ashley!
There's not much different that I can see except that the Text To Buy section now has some content in it - including the abiility to make mobile donations (I wrote about that idea back in 2004). I think that's awesome - except for the fact that Cingular isn't on their list of carriers, and is thus barfing the donation shortcode back at me. Come on Cingular! I can understand if you don't want to do a commercial deal yet (sorta), but let the donation stuff through!
PayPal is definitely going to have to add some sort of ID or address book system to this service sooner than later. No one remembers phone numbers any more - while trying it out, I've had to use S60's copy/paste feature from my address book which most phones don't have and most S60 users don't know about. It's be much nicer to be able to use someone's PayPal ID, or a pre-setup nickname. I'd also like a way of adding a basic money limit per day that I could send without going through the confirmation step - say $10 or $20. That would save PayPal costs in terms of having to make an IVR call to me for me to type in my PIN, and save me hassle while using it to pay for small stuff as well.
Now... when am I going to be able to put a "Buy with PayPal" button on my mobile website?
-Russ