I was really excited for Google Wallet, so much so that I bought a Galaxy Nexus.
Guess what? Verizon blocks it. If Google doesn't want to fight for their product, why should their co-founding engineer stick around? Happy he is off to Square.
(I'm not so much grumpy at losing a specific payment option I'm grumpy at one of the few companies with enough force to lean on Verizon capitulating. New tech gets slowed and I get sad.)
If you're unhappy with it you needn't stick with it for 2 full years. Many iphone users like to stay on the latest model and have found that the Early Termination Fee if often not that much more (if any) then the Ebay value of phone.
For example here is completed listings for Verizon 4G Galaxy Nexus:
One sold this morning for $390 incl a couple extras like car charger etc. If you bought in December your cancellation fee later this month will be $350 - (5 * $10) = $300. Now obviously that's not a free phone you're going to be out some money you laid down but you also can wait a bit more.
That is great thinking - I never thought about this. Does this work for phones that are the newest as well? For instance - my original incredible from 2 years ago?
Nobody really advertises, "capable of Google Wallet, but we won't let you have it". That's the problem with letting the carrier own the phone.
The Galaxy Nexus is a pretty nice phone, Wallet or not, and I'm not sure if anything else would have been as good anyway. Verizon's 4G network is better than Sprint's, anyway. A reasonable tradeoff for what amounts to a novelty. (I will need to carry my physical wallet until every store on Earth has an NFC reader anyway.)
I don't recall. I remember knowing the the Galaxy Nexus was supposed to be the first Android phone with NFC (and Google Wallet) for several months and then I recall learning that GW was blocked by Verizon, but I think I learned this after I received the phone. Either way - it was highly disappointing.
All the US carriers besides Sprint are backing the ISIS payment system. They've invested tens of millions of dollars into ISIS. They aren't going to let Google walk in and eat their lunch when they have the power (granted by Google ironically enough) to simply shut them out of the market. You can still side-load Google Wallet but it's DOA without wide support so it doesn't really matter.
Meanwhile, Osama Bedier is still a VP at Google and now an advisor to Mezz [1] a startup which, if he signed the same employment agreement the regular folks sign, means he probably will be moving on from Google shortly. (My personal experience is that Google pretty much considers any outside work a conflict of interest)
Why wouldn't Square want to work to make their payment platform accessible through multiple channels (NFC, their dongle, mobile-to-mobile, etc.)? Just as they should develop for many of the big software platforms, they will probably need to have product offerings that allow payments in multiple ways.
I don't have any insider knowledge of Square specific to this, but it's not that hard to make a shim for a PoS to do all sorts of stuff. I contracted for a company in 2003 which did NFC/RFID readers with a little magnetic shim for existing magstripe card readers. You can also integrate at a deeper level directly into the PoS -- there is some customization needed, but a lot of it is generic.
I'm sure they want to, but I'm also pretty sure they won't. At least not soon.
The thing that has struck me most consistently about Square is the brilliance of their restraint. Surely their endgame is to displace plastic cards. But they realize that what matters at this stage in the game is buy-in from consumers and merchants.
So where Dwolla and FaceCash go straight for the Brass Ring of a modern payment infrastructure, Square instead chose to provide a service that, while antiquated, is MASSIVELY useful in a broad range of retail scenarios.
Once they have the marketshare, which they get by leaning on the crutch of credit cards to enable the usability and usefulness of their product, they can just swap in a more modern payment backend, and voila... They win.
But the key is restraint, and focus on the current needs of merchants, and NFC is not.
Why isn't Google buying Square anyway? They really need a popular payments platform to integrate with Android. I realize they might not want to sell now, but maybe they want to sell it for a good price.
Doubtful. I've been in the same spot myself and eventually also left that employer - it's incredibly painful to be enthusiastically dedicated to a project and see it go nowhere. Worse yet, it goes nowhere because upper management is unwilling to throw their weight into it.
Eventually you get fed up and leave for a company that has a track record of actually pushing hard in the field you're interested in.
Guess what? Verizon blocks it. If Google doesn't want to fight for their product, why should their co-founding engineer stick around? Happy he is off to Square. (I'm not so much grumpy at losing a specific payment option I'm grumpy at one of the few companies with enough force to lean on Verizon capitulating. New tech gets slowed and I get sad.)