One of the features that Samsung focused on when it unveiled the Gear S2 smartwatch a couple of months back was that it’s capable of making contactless payments. The smartwatch has support for Samsung Pay, the company’s new mobile payments service which is already live on handsets like the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 edge+ in the United States. The company has now confirmed that Gear S2 won’t get support for the payment service until next year.
Even though Samsung Pay went live in the United States a couple of months ago and it has been quite a while since the Gear S2 went on sale in the country, the payment service has still not been enabled for the smartwatch. Samsung never really provided a date for that.
Now the company’s official Twitter account for the U.S. has confirmed in response to a customer query that instead of coming out in November as promised earlier, Samsung Pay is now expected to land on the Gear S2 in 2016. It’s a vague timeframe so one can’t really say for sure when in 2016 the service will go live for Samsung’s latest and greatest smartwatch.
It merits mentioning here that unlike the compatible Samsung handsets that support both MST and NFC, the Gear S2 doesn’t have the MST technology built in because of its smaller size, however it will fully be able to process Samsung Pay transactions using NFC. Support for both technologies is just one of the reasons why Samsung Pay adoption is rapidly increasing in the markets that it’s currently available in.
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