Stop the presses! At the Mobile World Congress today in Barcelona, Samsung unveiled a new Wallet app which enables users to store items such as sporting event tickets, boarding passes, and gift cards in one central location.
Sound familiar?
Well it should, because it’s essentially a copy of Apple’s Passbook app first introduced in iOS 6.
Wallet offers time and location-based push notifications (again, just like Passbook) to alert users as to when they are able to use the passes stored in their account, and it provides real-time updates for membership points and boarding pass changes. Third-party developers will be able to integrate with Wallet to easily let users add passes and tickets to the app, but any app integration has to be approved by Samsung.
Notably, and much like Apple’s Passbook, Samsung’s Wallet app implementation doesn’t include any NFC functionality, with the company explaining that retailers thus far have been slow to invest in the infrastructure necessary to support such a feature.
Of course, when Apple unveiled Passbook without NFC, analysts were up in arms.
In any event, Samsung announced that it has signed Wallet partnerships with Major League Baseball, Walgreens, Expedia, Belly, Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Lufthansa.
And oh yes, check out the icon for Samsung Wallet.
Look familiar?
Wallet is currently only available as a developer preview as the app will make its debut on the Samsung app store sometime in the near future.
via The Verge
Wed, Feb 27, 2013
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