Samsung Pay just killed its best feature on the S21 By CNET

Samsung just entered one of the best features on galaxy phones with the launch of the s21 series, and that is MST. Now all the three major mobile wallets in the US Apple Pay. Google Pay and Samsung pay, support, NFC or near field communications for mobile payments, but Samsung pay also had another technology called MST. Now MST stands for magnetic secure transmission. When you hold your phone against a terminal, the phone emits a magnetic signal that emulates the swipe of the magnetic strip on the back of a credit or debit card. Now this feature, let you pay at just about any terminal, even those that do not support tap to pay, contactless payments or NFC.

Now this feature was super cool, but now, with the launch of the s21 series in the US, Samsung has removed MST support, and I'm pretty sad about it. Let's rewind, to give you a little of context on why MST was so cool Samsung acquired a company called loop pay, and this was the technology that turned into the implementation that we saw on Samsung pay now loop pay kind of ironically, was originally designed for the iPhone not for android. It was a charging case or a little dongle that plugged into the headphone jack. Remember those and that let you pay with your phone pretty much anywhere, so the technology became Samsung's and in September 2015 we saw the launch of Samsung pay in the US on phones such as the Galaxy Note 5. Now this was the defining feature that helped set Samsung pay apart from all of its main competitors, because no other phone had this ability and also NFC payments were pretty slim on the ground in the US at that time.

Now I loved this feature so much. I could walk into pretty much any store and hold my phone up to make a payment. The sales assistant might tell me no, no, we don't accept payments with your phone at this store, and I'll say no, no. You actually can hold the phone over the terminal thief and the transaction would go through. It was like a tech superpower.

I even used Samsung pay at the Apple Store and yeah that didn't go down super well anyway. Samsung also loved this feature as much as I did, because there was a series of ads that did pretty much the same thing that I used to do. Well, I don't think that's going to work. It worked be paying with my phone too. All right, yeah, that's a lot of juice.

I didn't come here for judgment, but even though I'm a big fan of MST, it doesn't mean that necessarily everybody else who used Samsung pay was also using MST as much as I was at least, which is probably a big factor into why Samsung decided to remove it from us editions of the galaxy s21 phones, but I'm guessing if you've made it this far in the video you're. Probably just like me now, Samsung did issue a statement saying due to the rapid adoption of near-field communication technology by consumers and businesses, beginning with devices launched in 2021. Samsung pay will focus its support on NFC transactions across the galaxy portfolio, while future devices will no longer include magnetic stripe. Technology customers with previous compatible galaxy devices will be able to continue using Samsung pay, including MST. So it's not all doom and gloom, because it's not disappearing immediately, but it does mean that the note 20 ultra is the last Samsung phone in the US that will support MST payments, and I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that MST is disappearing from phones, because Samsung already started to remove MST support from its watches, like the active 2 and the watch 3.

So the writing has been on the wall for some time, but I'm still pretty sad about it. You might be thinking well, look. NFC. Payments are pretty much everywhere in the US right now like. Why are you complaining about this old technology disappearing? It just makes sense right.

Well, not quite while many us, retailers and large retailers have rolled out contactless payments, it's still not as prolific as elsewhere in the world, and the US has been really slow to adopt contactless and mobile payments compared to everywhere else, and also, if you think about it, the smaller retailers and local businesses like mom-and-pop stores and local grocers. Don't necessarily have the resources, time and money to be upgrading their systems to support contactless payments. So I'm still going to have to take my credit card everywhere we go and also shouldn't. We really be promoting contactless payments more in the middle of a pandemic, rather than taking away features. Okay.

So, apart from MST support, let's take a look at what else Samsung pay offers that might keep you in the ecosystem, especially if you are upgrading to a newer phone that doesn't have map support. So one of Samsung's pace strengths apart from having MST, was having a cashback system which was actually pretty useful. You could get points and cashback based on different purchases that you could use to redeem for, like your bill or other Samsung devices. If you accumulate it enough, you can also use a debit card called Samsung money which is kind of a nice way to keep an eye on. You know your finances, but is that really enough? Now we don't have MST if you're buying a newer phone.

Well, let's take a look at one of the main competitors or pretty much the only competitor if you have an android phone, which is Google Pay now, obviously, Google Pay works across any android device, not just Samsung Galaxy phones, and it has pretty much the same features as Samsung pay, especially after it got a huge overhaul at the end of 2020. Sure there's no debit card option, at least at the time of recording this, but it does have cash back payments, and you can also get some really fine-tuned results by searching on your transactions to find things like where you spent money on gas or how much money you spent on food. So I guess with that it's time to say goodbye to Samsung pay. It's been real, let's be honest: I've loved ms ton Samsung pay and I will still be using MST to its very last breath on this phone, but I think for every other phone, that's on android that I'm using and especially on the s21 series, I'm just going to switch to google pay thanks for watching. Let me know if you also agree with me on MST support on Samsung pay and make sure to check out my full Samsung pay FAQ, which is up on cnet.

com thanks for watching.

Source : CNET