Google will test electronic payments using near field communication technology in New York and San Francisco within four months, Bloomberg is reporting.

Bloomberg, quoting one of “two people familiar with project,” said Google would foot the bill to install thousands of NFC-enabled terminals in the two cities, supplied by Verifone.

Google would not comment for the story.

NFC makes it even easier than other methods to separate consumers from their money at brick-and-mortar establishments. There are already a handful of payment apps, but with NFC you don’t need to waste precious seconds scanning in a virtual barcode. All you have to do is touch or wave your phone near a payment terminal.

The technology is already built into some credit cards and dongles, but as smartphones increasingly become the one thing you cannot leave home without, the potential to turn them into electronic wallets is enormous.

When there actually are NFC smartphones, that is.

NFC was baked into Google’s Android 2.3 update in December, but so far there is exactly one phone in the United States that can take advantage of the technology: Samsung’s Nexus S. Analysts assume Apple will incorporate NFC in the next iPhone, and that generation would be available in June — also within the next four months — if past is prologue. Research in Motion isn’t expected to release any NFC-enabled Blackberries until the third quarter.

Nokia has said last year that all its phones would include NFC this year — although that was before they tied up with Microsoft and abandoned its flagship Symbian OS. Microsoft’s Windows 7 Phone doesn’t currently support NFC.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a sneak peak of the company’s NFC tech at the at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last November, “checking in” to the conference by touching what was almost certainly a Nexus S to a conference sign that had a built-in antenna.

Photo: Google CEO Eric Schmidt holds up his Google phone as he speaks at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Monday, Nov. 15, 2010. (Paul Sakuma/Associated Press)

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