At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Optus handed me a watch prepaid with money. This is what happened next.
After announcing this morning that it would offer wearables to consumer who didn’t have compatible NFC smartphones to use its Cash By Optus system Optus handed the journalists present a sample of the style of smartwatch to trial for a couple of hours while at Mobile World Congress. The watches had a sum pre-loaded onto them, and for the purposes of ethical disclaimer, it was $100, with the idea being that we could test out how well tap and go payment works when you use it from a smartwatch.
Cash By Optus uses VISA’s Paywave system with as a prepaid, preloaded credit card, and doesn’t in fact require a nearby smartphone for the purposes of initiating a transaction. It will pair with a smartphone app for the purposes of loading credit, and Optus again provided a smartphone with the App already loaded for the purposes of the trial.
The watch itself is a basic, chunky affair, and it’s not exactly positioned as a “smart” watch in the same way that, say, the Apple watch or similar devices work. Instead, it’s more of a “feature” watch, with the key feature being the inbuilt NFC and payWave compatibility. Optus is somewhat too polite to say so, but it’s primarily got to be a play for the Apple community, as even though the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus do offer NFC, it’s locked down for Apple Pay only, and Apple Pay has yet to launch in Australia. On the plus side, they claim it’s compatible for any Bluetooth smartphone on any platform, so that should cover Windows Phone, Blackberry, and even the (estimated) three people in Australia who bought Firefox phones, I suppose.
The key to the trial is of course going out to buy something, so I headed to one of MWC’s food areas to avail myself of some tasty comestibles.
The answer was yes. In strict technical terms there really shouldn’t be any difference in paying this way, because it’s using quite standard and well understood protocols, although you don’t half get a funny look from the staff when you tap on the reader with your watch. It’s also worth making the ergonomic point that tapping the watch screen to the reader involves flipping your wrist around where with a card or phone you’d tap downwards.
Still, it worked, and I purchased a packet of chips as a test case.
So I got bold (and a little hungry) and tried to order a kebab. This ended in disaster, with the terminal failing to read the watch in any way at all.
Now, it’s hard to say if this was the fault of the watch, the payment system or the reader. The device is still in the trial phase, and a few quirks are to be expected, especially when dealing with international payments.
All I will say is that there’s no substitute for the kind of awkward you get when you have to explain how your watch has failed to pay for your lunch to a Spanish waitress who’s looking at you like you have three heads and one of them just started spouting racist gibberish.
That does point to one potential drawback to this whole system, and it’s not the point of failure one. It’ll take some time for device-based payment that isn’t a card or phone to gain social traction, and until it does you’re going to have to explain it to absolutely everybody every single time you use it.
Failure made me stubborn, so I tried again at a different location to purchase a hot dog and drink. This did work, although the hot dog was absolutely terrible. I guess that’s not Optus’ fault.
Obvious ethical disclaimer: I used Optus’ money to buy SOME CHIPS and a TERRIBLE HOT DOG and a DRINK. Clearly, I am history’s greatest monster. You may now judge me.
As a watch, by the way, I’m sticking to that “feature” designation, as it’s a very simple affair indeed. It will show the currently understood credit as one of its panels, and you can pair back to the app to update that total as you spend your preloaded cash with relatively minimal fuss.
Optus’ intent is to bring wearables that work with Cash By Optus to the Australian market by the end of the year. It’s probably only a niche market with the wider adoption of NFC, and naturally you’d have to be happy with the style of the wearable. Optus has said it’s looking into other form factors as well, but at least at a technical level it’s certainly functional.
Alex Kidman travelled to Barcelona as a guest of HTC.
Alex Kidman purchased comestibles with Optus’ money, and regrets very little aside from that hot dog.