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If you enjoy playing games or watching movies on your PS3 or other Sony device, you may be interested to hear that Sony has added a fourth option for adding funds to your PlayStation Store digital wallet. Previously the only options were credit card, prepaid gift card, or PayPal. Now you can charge digital content to your mobile phone bill.

That means using your mobile phone and SMS text messages you can purchase additional items such as games, DLC, movies, and TV shows. You can even charge monthly Music Unlimited subscriptions to your phone bill. Sony says that adding funds to your digital wallet from your phone bill will require the user to reply to an SMS text message and text messaging rates will apply.

All charges will be placed on your mobile phone bill in the next payment cycle. Apparently, some prepaid mobile phone services will also support this payment type. This sounds weird until you think about the fact that some people may not want to trust Sony with their credit card information and a lot of people don’t have PayPal accounts.

Google gave the broadest of targets when it said Google Play carrier billing would reach Verizon in the “coming weeks” — those last two words are often hints from companies that we shouldn’t hold our breath. Call us surprised, then, when Google quietly takes the option live two weeks later. At least one Droid-Life reader has discovered that it’s now possible to load as many as $25 in purchases per month on an existing Big Red smartphone bill and pay through just the one channel. The move puts all four major US carriers on the same page, and gives Verizon subscribers an incentive to splurge on apps and movies for that new Droid RAZR HD… so long as they remember to deal with the financial fallout afterwards.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Google, Verizon

Google Play carrier billing goes live for impulse buyers on Verizon originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Making a half dozen attempts to guess your login info or typing each digit of a credit card account certainly can get in the way of following through on impulse purchases, which is exactly how you’d categorize FarmVille cash or a featured flick that you know you may not have time to watch within the month. The solution is carrier billing, eliminating those precious seconds between impulse and reconsideration, and Telefonica has just signed on to offer the service to Facebook, Google, Microsoft and RIM account holders. The partnerships will enable O2 users in Germany or Movistar subscribers in Spain to charge purchases to their mobile phone accounts, for example — in total, 14 Telefonica subsidiaries should be up and running with carrier billing by the end of the year, though some services, such as Google Play and Facebook, have already begun to roll out. Click through to the PR after the break for the full breakdown.

Continue reading Telefonica partners with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and RIM for global carrier billing

Telefonica partners with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and RIM for global carrier billing originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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