MobileBeat 2011 conference is currently underway and payments leader PayPal have announced that they are supporting NFC (near field communications) on mobile as a new way to both shop and pay. PayPal demonstrated their NFC solution in the form of a new NFC-enabled Android widget that lets people send payments by just tapping two phones together. The widget is expected to arrive later this summer.

A video of the demo is available above and it shows that a PayPal user can either send or receive money using the PayPal NFC widget. Once a person initiates the request, both people just tap their phones together until they buzz, the buzz indicates that the data transfer is complete. There are security measures if required, users can enable an option which requires the entry of a PIN or password to complete the transaction.

The above demo was achieved by using the Samsung Nexus S handsets, but there are other NFC-enabled handsets in the wild and coming soon. The upcoming BlackBerry Bold (9900/9930), Nokia's Astound and variants of the Samsung Galaxy S II.