Pay With Square (for iPhone)

By Jill Duffy

If I could see one consumer technology be adopted faster, it would be virtual payment systems. The way we, in the United States, currently handle financial transactions is okay at best. Even American cash is horribly designed and outdated. Over the next few months and years, I really want to see virtual mobile payments work properly, take off, and change the way we think about monetary transactions. The Pay With Square app (free), for iPhone and Android, is helping to lead the way.

Pay With Square is a mobile payment app from a company called Square that makes another product/service, also known simply as Square, which small businesses can use to turn their iPads into credit card processing machines. Any merchant that uses Square can accept payments from wallet-less app-lovers, like myself, who carry Pay With Square on their smartphones.

The app works on iPhone and iPod touch running iOS 4.1 and later, as well as Android phones running version 2.2 and later (although "small screen" Android phones are not supported). I tested the iPhone app for this review.

How it Works
Of the three major mobile payment systems I've tested?Pay With Square, Google Wallet (free, 4 stars), and LevelUp (free, 3 stars)?Pay With Square one is the most peculiar. It doesn't require a four-digit PIN, relying instead on your very presence, phone in hand, and your ability to recite your username as its authentication system. You, your phone, and your username all have to be present in order for the cashier to find you listed on Square and select your username and related credit card to be charged. You also need to toggle open your "tab" for the business in the app, but you can leave your tab open for businesses where you're a frequent customer.

Say you walk into a local coffee shop, as I did, that accepts Pay With Square. You have to find the business listed in the app on your phone, select it, and slide a button to open your tab. When your tab is open and your device is within range, the cashier sees your username show up on her iPad screen in the Square register app. You'll order your drink, and tell the cashier you want to pay with Square. She'll ask for your username, and when you tell her, she'll find the match and initiate the payment. In a few seconds, the transaction is complete. You also have the option to add a tip.

"Why is Pay With Square different?" you may ask. Let's look at how the other players do it. Google Wallet uses a near-field communication (NFC) chip inside the phone to communicate with a PayPass reader and a four-digit PIN to authenticate any transaction. LevelUp, on the other hand, uses QR codes on screen to initiate transactions. You launch your LevelUp app, and the cashier grabs the business's smartphone. Your app displays a QR code, which the cashier scans with the other phone. LevelUp has an optional PIN (which I think should be mandatory and turned on by default). Pay With Square is the only solution of these three that lets you make the payment without so much as dipping your screen in the cashier's direction. You could even leave your device in your pocket or bag, if you keep your tab open in the app.

Features
Pay With Square supports all major credit cards, any card with a MasterCard, Visa, American Express, or Discover logo. When you set up the app, you can enter information for multiple cards and set whichever one you like as the default.

When you want to use the app to buy something, you first have to find a merchant that accepts it as a form of payment, and here Pay With Square isn't as elegantly designed as Google Wallet or LevelUp. Pay With Square shows you a list of merchants nearby, with their distance from your current location shown numerically in miles?but not on a map.

Additionally, it's not always clear from the list what each business is or does because there's no classification, like "restaurant" or "bicycle shop." Often businesses have telling names, but not always, like "one buddha LLC" and "VERAMEAT," two merchants that appeared on my app. You have to click the business name and open a new page to see a description, a field that I'm guessing each proprietor fills in because they are horribly inconsistent. For example, I learned that VERAMEAT is a jewelry store, but the description for one buddha LLC contained nothing more than an address. (After a few Internet searches, I still don't know anything about this business.)?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/Xb6MHwd6dDU/0,2817,2408286,00.asp

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