BARCELONA, Spain – Samsung Electronics today unveiled its fifth-generation Galaxy S flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5, which will support NFC, as expected, and also feature a fingerprint sensor in the home button that can secure mobile payments. PayPal has announced it will be the first payments company to support the fingerprint authentication feature on the device.
The feature, which also can unlock the phone, is similar to Touch ID in Apple’s iPhone 5s, which replaces passwords to make payments with iTunes accounts. On the Galaxy S5, PayPal said users could pay with their PayPal accounts at any merchant that accepts PayPal on mobile and in-store. The in-store payments are still conducted on the Internet over the mobile network and are not believed linked to PayPal’s other in-store payment technology tryouts.
The Galaxy S5, which will be available in April, also supports card-present payments at the physical point of sale through its support for NFC card emulation, in addition to the two other NFC communication modes, tag reading and peer-to-peer.
Besides supporting secure elements, the new device will support host-card emulation, since the phone will run Android 4.4, KitKat. Google has made host-card emulation, or HCE, a default feature in KitKat. This would enable Galaxy S5 users to tap at contactless point-of-sale terminals or other contactless card readers with applications stored in phone memory or in the cloud. Of course, for payments, schemes would have to approve the phone or grant a waiver.
Samsung in initial press material did not feature the NFC support in the Galaxy S5, though it did quote a Deutsche Telekom senior vice president for mobile terminals, Christan Stangier, as saying Samsung has been a “key partner” for the telco for years to help it introduce such technologies as LTE and “NFC for mobile payment.”
NFC has been a feature of Samsung’s flagships since the Galaxy S II. Samsung unveiled the much-anticipated Galaxy S5 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
PayPal noted that it will not store sensitive biometric data on its servers and will not store any personal information on the device for users.
“The device securely communicates between the fingerprint sensor on their device and PayPal’s service in the cloud,” said PayPal’s chief product officer Hill Ferguson in a statement. “The only information the device shares with PayPal is a unique encrypted key that allows PayPal to verify the identity of the customer without having to store any biometric information on PayPal’s servers.”
PayPal yesterday announced users would be able to make network-based payments, redeem offers and receive payment notifications on Samsung’s Gear 2 smartwatches, which the device maker also introduced at the Mobile World Congress.
The Galaxy S5, which offers no groundbreaking new features, has a powerful 2.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, slightly larger screen, higher resolution camera and heart and other health and fitness monitors.