Samsung Pay Coming to Cheaper Samsung Smartphones Later

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Samsung Pay

Samsung Pay 1

Samsung Pay is the Korean company’s mobile payments service rivaling Apple Pay and Android Pay from Apple and Google respectively. The service, currently live in the United States and Korea with other countries in Europe also on the radar for launch before the year wraps up. In the US, Samsung Pay is reported to have scored half a million registrations already while it is said to be registering 25,000 users daily in Samsung’s home market, Korea. Even then, the nascent mobile payments service that seeks to make it convenient to pay for goods and services without being overwhelmed by lots of plastic cards in your wallet all the time, is only available on a few premium Samsung Galaxy smartphones.

Samsung is promising that at an unspecified time, the service will also make it to the company’s cheaper devices which have so far not gotten any love. Samsung’s head of mobile and global co-CEO JK Shin says the service will “gradually expand” to its less pricey smartphone options.

Such a move will be welcome since these “cheap” smartphones are widely popular in emerging markets and having the service supported would bring with it a lot of convenience while also opening up the service to many more customers than the high end devices that currently support it could ever bring. With Apple already working on taking Apple Pay to its biggest iPhone market, China and Google just having made it possible for all Android users with compatible devices in the United States to access the Android Pay application on the Play Store, Samsung will surely need as many users as possible if it is to one-up the two.

Samsung is currently available on Samsung’s 2015 premium Galaxy smartphones. Since it only works using technologies like Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) and Near-Field Communication (NFC), it is not possible for it to work on most existing Samsung smartphones due to lack of support for these technologies.

 

Source: Korean Herald