“After unveiling its new credit-card reader at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco earlier this month, Square tested [its] newfangled contraption at a Blue Bottle coffee shop in Mint Plaza, just down the street,” Cade Metz reports for Wired. “The reader doesn’t accept ordinary credit cards. It takes a newer breed of card equipped with an EMV chip for greater security, and it accepts Apple Pay, that much-hyped means of making card payments via the iPhone or the fledgling Apple Watch. With so many Apple faithful descending on the nearby Moscone Center for WWDC — the centerpiece of Apple’s year — Blue Bottle provided an unusually ripe proving ground for the new reader and the larger push towards Apple Pay and other ‘contactless’ payments systems.”
“According to Jesse Dorogusker, who oversaw the creation of the new reader as Square’s head of hardware, the tests revealed some ‘weird’ behavior among those paying for some mighty good coffee with their personal Apple gadgets. Some people touched their wrists to the reader with their Apple Watches facing up, before realizing that the Watch doesn’t send a payment unless it’s facing down,” Metz reports. “And sometimes, when they positioned their phones and Watches in the correct way and a payment went through flawlessly, they’re weren’t quite sure that it had. By the time they looked at their phone or watch display, he says, the notification saying they had paid successfully was already gone. ‘You have to adapt to the experience being too fast.'”
Metz reports, “Despite the hiccups during that week of testing at Blue Bottle, Dorogusker believes that Apple Pay has a sizable future and that Square’s new reader can help bootstrap this new reality.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple needs to overcome their fear of bad battery life reports and allow Apple Watch users to set their own durations for how long the display stays activated. We can handle it, Apple. Really, we can! If we set it for too long and run out of battery life before hitting the hay, we’ll quickly learn our lesson and reduce the display duration.
We hope that addition to watchOS setting arrives sooner than later!
SEE ALSO:
Square founder Jack Dorsey talks new Apple Pay-integrated hardware – June 10, 2015