I recently bought a new phone and passed on my old Nokia Lumia 920 to my wife. She has a strong opinion on the use of cases for phones, especially when we have little kids playing with them. In order to placate her I purchased a wallet style leather case and put the phone in it. She was really happy as the case came with some inserts that she could store credit cards in and use it as a pseudo wallet when she couldn’t be bothered carrying around her hand bag.

Then my wife started complaining about the phone making these strange bubbling noises. I laughed it off and took the phone in order to listen for myself. I flipped open the case and sure enough the phone started bubbling! It was actually quite a pleasant sound but the curious side of me couldn’t just let it go. I searched high and low in the phone settings but couldn’t find anything that would be causing it.

I turned instead to Google and found this thread with some posters describing a noise as “it sounds like Tiny Bubbles…”. That’s it! That’s the noise!!! Further on in the thread people linked the noise to NFC and I realised that my wife had put a credit card with Pay Pass in the wallet case. Whenever she opened the wallet she flipped the cover around to the back of the phone to use it. This of course put the Pay Pass chip at the back of the phone and activated Tap and Send.

Since my wife cares about NFC about as much as I care about putting the seat down on the toilet, I have disabled Tap and Send for now. Happy wife, happy life…