Published by Ewan Spence at 17:25 UTC, October 30th 2011

Tucked away in the press releases from Nokia World was a small note that Nokia would be working with the New York Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA). Given that the MTA announced this trial without mentioning the hardware partner earlier in the year, it's great to see Nokia has picked up a high visibility hardware trial (at least in business circles) in America.

It looks like the Nokia 603 will be the handset of choice, running Belle with a software update to allow NFC SIM cards to be used in the stylish handset.

Along with the headline grabbing "Angry Birds Magic" NFC variant, Nokia is making a number of smart choices in the NFC space, and while their "touch to pair" system was one of the under-rated stands at Nokia World, it is making lots of small steps that are marking it out as an innovatorin the consumer space with this technology.

Much as it did with camera phones and GPS (to name two bits of now accepted technologies). With NFC support limited in Android, and non-existent in iOS and Windows Phone (although that's sure to change with Nokia's input to Microsoft), NFC is one of the areas where Symbian can continue to show its strength.

More on this story at NFC World.