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While Americans remain addicted to their credit cards, whipping them out to pay for numberless purchases large and small, customers of Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo now have the power to pack their wallets in their smartphones.

Back in June, NTT launched the cashless payment program, dubbed FeliCa, that lets customers shop, travel, and otherwise manage monetary transactions letting their smartphones handle the banking.

To make the service worthwhile to its customers, the mobile operator rolled FeliCa out at a number of different types of locations, including airports, movie theatres and convenience stores.

The hardware end of FeliCa is the new Symbian-based Fujitsu FOMA F900iC smartphone, which incorporates a Sony FeliCa smartcard. Smartcards use flash memory to store a variety of information, such as medical records and, especially, digital cash.

With its FeliCa-enabled smartphone, NTT DoCoMo takes the latter example to the next level by enabling the mobile handset to serve as a "wallet." As a result, users can make ATM withdrawals, credit card purchases and face-to-face debit transactions with their F900iC. It may even play the role of a personal ID "card."

For security, F900iC owners can lock the smartphone using a password and, more interestingly, a sweep-type fingerprint sensor. In addition, a private or public phone can be pre-registered into the handset to enable remote locking of the smartcard functions or the entire phone itself if it is lost or stolen.

(Other F900iC features include an auto focus CCD camera with 1.28 mega-pixel resolution and a 2.4-inch (QVGA) LCD with 262,144 colors. It also has a miniSD card slot and a smaller 4,096-color screen for time, date and other basic information.)

Japan is always ahead of the curve when it comes to electronic gadgets and mobile technology. So we probably won't see Americans giving up their credit cards anytime soon. On the other hand, if millions of us can make the transition from compact discs to MP3s -- as well as have our bank accounts debited automatically when we drive through a tollbooth -- then perhaps we're readier for this sort of technology than the pundits might think.