Mobile payment feature Samsung Pay has been already launched in India by Samsung a few months back. But the facility can be used only by the owners of the high-end models of the company’s smartphones. There are specific hardware components required to make Samsung Pay functional in the phones and these are available only in a few phones till now from the Samsung stable. The market is quite diverse and smartphone makers have to cater to all the segments. Where the budget phones are sold, there is a certain compromise on the hardware provisions to make them cost effective.
To balance this, Samsung has come up with a modified or scaled down version called Samsung Pay Mini and it comes to India now. The company used the occasion of the launch of their smartphones, Samsung Galaxy J7 Max and Galaxy J7 Pro for the Indian market, to introduce the Samsung Pay Mini.
The concept behind developing this ‘Mini’ version of the digital payment mode is to facilitate the users owning budget phones also to make these payments. The major difference between the full-fledged Samsung Pay and Samsung Pay Mini is that offline payments using credit and debit cards cannot be performed with this facility.
The arrangement where you can tap your card on the POS (point of sale) machines is not available in the stripped-down mode. Instead, Samsung has integrated the digital payment mechanisms such as UPI (Unified Payment Interface) which the Indian Government has launched for facilitating payments at the points of sale. There won’t be any exclusive e-wallet facility with the Samsung Pay Mini that the Samsung Pay offers.
From that perspective, analysts are not sure how far Samsung Pay Mini will be able to succeed in becoming the preferred payment method, when the same facilities are available on many other devices. Even a payment app like PayTM could prove to be a tough competitor for Samsung Pay Mini from the first day of its presence.