IMO one of the biggest failures of android devices is the lack of unification on the NFC coils location. Extending the range is a bandaid, but welcomed.

Apple did it right by putting it at the top of the phone. Touching the top of the phone is so much more intuitive than awkwardly sliding your phone up and down the reader until the coil somewhere in the middle of the phone lines up. Maybe android beam could have been an actually useful feature if they hadn’t fucked it up.

I thought distance was limited to the diameter of the antenna?

NFC Release 15, with an increase from 0.5 cm to 2 cm.

Yeah, make it easier to sniff

Looking forward to accidentally paying for someone else’s purchase at the next register over.

And sales of RFID-protected amiibo wallets and cases will start to increase.

There are tons of wallets out there with RF blocking and it's also very simple to add to an existing wallet using some aluminum foil or similar. As for the phone, you really should always require entering your pin or biometrics authentication before accessing your sensitive data like credit cards in addition to the phone needing to be unlocked. This should be done even with current tech because the scanners that thieves use have had much longer range for a long time. They don't care about following standards or RF interference laws.