Phoneless: Samsung Pay coming to Gear S2 in November, 3G model will still work untethered

Quentyn Kennemer
9 years ago

Samsung today unleashed more details about the Samsung Gear S2 family that’s launching later this year. For starters, the company has confirmed that Samsung Pay would be coming to the new smart watch this November.

The advent of NFC on the Gear S2, Gear S2 Classic and Gear S2 3G will make it possible to pay for your goods at participating stores with Samsung Pay without even having to take your phone out of your pocket. This is possible thanks to a Samsung Pay app specifically for the Gear S2 being loaded onto your watch. The app stores your payment information with a

The watch uses a 1-2 security punch for Samsung Pay:

The watch continuously monitors your heart rate, so if you haven’t taken the watch off since the last time you authorized it for payments it’ll be painless to walk up to a PoS terminal and pay.
If the watch was removed from your wrist since the last time you made a payment, it will ask for a personalized PIN that you set up to authorize the next payment, and won’t ask again until the next time you take the watch off.

This is a nice balance of convenience and security for those who don’t want to sacrifice one for the other.

And things get even sweeter if you have the 3G-enabled Gear S2: you won’t even need your phone to be tethered to your smart watch in order to make payments. This is opposed to the other two, which require a Bluetooth connection to your phone in order for it to communicate with the internet.

That said, it’s important to remember that Samsung Pay will only work if you use a supported Samsung Galaxy device, reason being that Samsung can only ensure that their firmware is safe enough to handle your sensitive information (because the Samsung Knox security suite definitely does live up to its name). Keep that in mind when you’re deciding whether you want to join Samsung’s camp for your smartphone needs, especially since their new smart watches now work with almost any Android phone running Android 4.4 or higher.