Paying with your smartwatch hasn’t really hit the mainstream yet. Actually, smartwatches in general have yet to hit the mainstream. But they will, as will using them independently from your smartphones for certain things like fitness tracking, music, and paying for your burrito. After being the first real smartwatch out of the gate, Pebble arguably fell behind stylistically and functionally. With the release of Pebble Time and Pebble Round, the style part is covered and with with an upcoming addition of NFC payments the functionality deficit is shrinking as well.
“But Pebble watches don’t have NFC built in! What are these Shenanigans?!?!” you may be shouting while waving your fist in the air. You would be right. However, what they do have, is a smart accessory port. Third party developers can use this port to connect hardware extensions, adding features which don’t exist on the smartwatch itself. As part of a hackathon, a company called CONNECTEDEVICE came up with, and recently finalized just such an extension. Using a platform that provides secure, tokenized payment and authentication developed by FitPay, CONNECTEDEVICE has created the Pagaré Smartstrap. Containing the required NFC chip, the band will connect and sync with the Pebble watches allowing payments independently of smartphones, using a simple wave of your arm. This represents a more graceful approach than Pebble’s attempt at mobile payments through PayPal last year.
Using the same recipe as Pebble, CONNECTEDEVICE will use a Kickstarter campaign to get its product built and into the hands of consumers. They are also getting some help from the folks at Pebble, who will be using some funds left over from their own Kickstarter campaign to help fund the Pagaré one.
“The Pagaré contactless payment Smartstrap is bringing a game-changing new feature to the Pebble Time family of products, This is the exact type of robust, new capability that we envisioned the open platform for smartstraps would create for Pebble.” – Eric Migicovsky, the Pebble CEO
The Kickstarter campaign is due to being in January 2016, with pricing and shipping dates yet to be announced. The band will come three color options, black, brown, and white.
Are you looking forward to this addition to the Pebble line up? Let us know in the comments or on social media.
[button link=”https://pagare.me/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: FitPay[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
