Samsung’s has admitted its planned Apple Pay mobile payments rival will not arrive this July, as previously announced.
During an investor call, reported by Bloomberg (via The Verge), Samsung revealed the Galaxy S6-centric Samsung Pay platform will now not arrive in the U.S. and South Korea until September.
That means the launch is likely to coincide with the arrival of the next-generation Samsung Galaxy Note 5 phablet, scheduled to debut at the IFA tech fair in Berlin during that month.
The scheme, which utilises the LoopPay technology Samsung acquired in February, is also scheduled to arrive in Europe, China, South America and Australia later this year.
The two-month delay may not seem like a big deal, but given Apple’s aggressive and promising Apple Pay rollout across the United States and Google’s recently announced Android Pay initiative, time is of the essence.
Google’s Android Pay service is currently in use in about 700,000 locations in the United States, thanks to its ability to turn any Android smartphone application into a digital wallet for physical and online use.
Read more: Apple Pay vs Samsung Pay
The Samsung Pay platform, which now includes partnerships with major card providers Visa and Mastercard, enables NFC payments through contactless readers, plus instant compatibility with 90 per cent of traditional magnetic strip card readers currently in circulation.
As we wrote in a recent breakdown of the new service: “This
essentially fools classic magnetic stripe card reader technology into
thinking a physical card is being swiped through, when it’s actually a
digital signal. In practice, it will feel much like a standard NFC
payment.”
Which service do you think will come out on top? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
