"If Apple ships an NFC-ready iPhone, that could prod people to buy it, but the Google Wallet hasn't really done anything [to further contactless payments]," said Will Stofega, an IDC analyst. "In order to have a real takeoff of NFC, you have to have it everywhere. We're in the early stages."

Apple has been shipping more than 30 million iPhones per quarter, but even at that rate, iPhones with NFC and a mobile wallet app won't even reach the mass market of U.S. users until 2016 at the earliest, according to a .

Juniper Research, in a study released Wednesday, found that only 2% of U.S. and Western European NFC-ready users will buy goods with such devices in all of 2012. The figure is expected to increase to 25% in 2016.

An with NFC and a mobile wallet app "will help drive NFC phone penetration, but will do little for [growing] the ecosystem, which involves banks, telcos, card networks, merchants, processors and more," said Gartner analyst Sandy Shen.

Shen also predicted that won't use its popular iTunes app with NFC smartphones for billing. Instead, Apple is more likely to rely on having customers make a direct link to their credit cards or bank accounts for a smartphone purchase "because of the higher risks involved" in NFC purchases, she said.