Samsung Pay allows people to make payments at PoS (Point of Sale) terminals using their smartphones. In this process, the Samsung Pay app sends your credit or debit card information to the PoS machine using NFC (Near Field Communication). This convenient feature might get even better, thanks to upcoming NFC upgrades.
Currently, NFC can operate up to a distance of 5mm. That means when you are making a payment using Samsung Pay, you have to bring your smartphone so close to the PoS terminal that the two devices almost touch each other. Although that isn’t troublesome, the NFC Forum plans to make this process more convenient. In a new roadmap laid out by the NFC Forum, the group aims to increase the range of NFC four to six times than the current state. That means it can operate up to a distance of 30mm in the near future. This improvement will directly benefit Samsung Pay. People will be able to make payments without having to touch their smartphone to the PoS machine.
That won’t be the only improvement, though. Increasing the range will also decrease the precision required for aligning the antenna of the NFC chip in the smartphone with that of the PoS terminal, reducing failures and speeding up the payment process. While there is no info on when this change will make its way to new devices, it should happen before 2028, according to the roadmap.
The NFC Forum also plans to increase the charging wattage of NFC from 1W to 3W. This change will open up a whole new world of possibilities. For instance, it will allow people to charge their Galaxy Watch or Galaxy Buds using any NFC-enabled smartphone, and not just the ones with reverse wireless charging.
