Gadgetory

mobile payments are quick and easy I bet you've heard that one plenty of times before but this is different it's called Samsung pay and it's available now in the US following a launch in South Korea Samsung pay works virtually all retailers from high-end boutiques like heidi says or food retailers like Noah's Bagels so it works with a couple of different technologies there's NFC for tap and go like Apple and Android pay and MST or magnetic secure transmission this is where the phone emits a magnetic signal that simulates the strip on a credit or a debit card and it means it's backwards compatible with almost all existing payment terminals no upgrade required I've used Samsung pay for more than two weeks now and it works just about everywhere I even bought something from the Apple store I use it at 10 shops in the Westfield San Francisco Center from the food court to Bloomingdale's and even a vending machine in fact the only real problem I had was convincing sales assistants it was going to work but there are a few catches Samsung pay only works with four high-end Samsung Galaxy handsets right now and you have to be on one of these major carriers Verizon isn't one of them and your card needs to be issued by Bank of America US bank or city like many other mobile payment systems Samsung pay uses tokenization to keep transactions secure first up it generates a 16 digit virtual card number that's stored on the device not your actual card number and then every time you make a transaction it generates a one-time cryptogram from the phone's encryption key it sends both of those pieces of information to the terminal to make the payment payments also need to be authorized either with a fingerprint or a pin as you can see it's pretty easy to shop too you drop with Samsung pay because it works on NFC terminals it works on EMV or chip card readers as well as the traditional magnetic stripe readers for more on samsung pay check out cnet.com