Forget Your Wallet? Use Your Cell Phone; Trend Evolves In Japan, Korea; Wireless carriers hope idea will boost customer loyalty; U.S. adoption may be slow.(INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY)

Byline: MIKE ANGELL

With credit cards, debit cards and ATM cards, it's not as if we need more ways to spend money. But now here comes the cell phone.

Japan's largest wireless carrier, NTT DoCoMo, and South Korea's SK Telecom are offering cell phones that double as electronic wallets. Users can go into a shop to buy something, wave the phone in front of a reader and walk out with the goods.

Wireless carriers hope that such services will further wed people to their mobile phones. But like other cell phone trends born in Asia, it may take several years for it to catch on widely.

"We've come to another phase of the cell phone market," said Susumu Takeuchi, a U.S. spokesman for DoCoMo, a unit of Nippon Telephone & Telegraph. "Handsets should be linked to a person's everyday activities."

DoCoMo in July debuted phones that offer the payment feature, which it calls FeliCa. FeliCa is part of DoCoMo's i-mode cell phone news and information service, which has 45 million customers.

Since July, DoCoMo has sold 450,000 phones equipped with FeliCa chips. About 10,000 convenience stores, video rental outlets and other shops have FeliCa sensors.