Sprint has halved the price of its flagship Nexus S 4G phone, allowing consumers to begin surfing the rising wave of mobile NFC-enabled payments at a lower price.

Sprint has halved the price of its flagship Nexus S 4G phone, allowing consumers to begin surfing the rising wave of mobile NFC-enabled payments at a lower price.

According to Sprint, the carrier is now selling the Nexus 4G for $99.99 with a two-year contract, after on May 8 for $199.99.

If nothing else, the price cut shows how quickly new phones can be discounted, especially with the never-ending flood of new Android phones. But also criticized it for being a "surprisingly poor voice phone". isn't sold on its site; Best Buy sells it for $99.99, too.

But the Nexus S 4G is special, in that it's not only a flagship phone for Google but also the only one, at the moment, that contains a Near-Field Communication chip. The NFC technology is at the heart of , the partnership between Google, MasterCard, and Sprint. Google Wallet-enabled phones can use the embedded chip to store what is essentially a credit card built into the phone, which then charges the user the purchase price when the phone is tapped against an NFC reader. However, purchasing via Google Wallet is still in field tests, for now.

Based on executive comments at the recent MobileBeat conference in San Francisco this week, the consensus seems to be that a broad wave of NFC-enabled phones will be rolling out at the end of 2011 and well into 2012, but that merchant support will lag behind.

using the Nexus S 4G at the recent MobileBeat conference, where , and confirmed that Isis, the collection of carriers who originally set out to define a payment platform, would now scale back and use existing channels like Visa and Mastercard.

And then there's Visa, which plans its own digital wallet product.In an interview this week at MobileBeat, Bill Gajda, head of mobile product for Visa, said that his company's digital wallet was scheduled to roll out at the end of August and early September. "I think there's going to be a series of developmental launches as we head towards September," he said in an interview.

On stage, Gajda criticized Google Wallet for its one-carrier, one-phone strategy. Behind the scenes, "I think there's too much friction for consumers," he said. "Customers just want to do what they want to do. And it's not just Visa. They have lots of payment cards in their wallets."

Otherwise, the Nexus S 4G runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a 1-GHz processor. It features a 4-inch Super AMOLED 480-by-800 touch-screen display, a rear-facing 5-megapixel camera with camcorder and flash, and a front-facing VGA camera. The Nexus S 4G is Bluetooth-enabled, has stereo speakers, and a media player with 3.5mm stereo headset jack.