My new MacBook Pro laptop has a nifty feature that at first I thought was a gimmick – the fingerprint scanner. Throughout my work day I may be on the phone, or leave the room, then when I return my screen has been locked for security purposes and I must authenticate to get back to work. With a simple press of my right index finger my identity is validated and I’m back to work on the laptop, quite convenient for me saving time and effort of typing a password on the keyboard and pressing the Return key.
My youngest son has been urging me to turn this fingerprint scanning feature on with my Galaxy Note 4 smart phone, so yesterday I finally agreed and started the process. I basically had to swipe my finger across the Home button for 10 strokes, and click the Done prompt to get things all setup.
My phone screen locks way faster and more often than my laptop screen does, so now I get to save even more time and effort to unlock the phone quickly with a stroke of my finger. All is well, but wait. Within several minutes of turning on this new fangled feature I started receiving emails that three of my credit cards saved on my phone for Android Pay had been disconnected. Uh oh, I hadn’t consciously removed those credit cards, or had I?
It turns out that Android Pay on my phone wants to be ultra-secure, so when the the security mechanism on my phone was changed from a password to a fingerprint scan it decided to be overly cautious and remove the cards. It was a simple matter for me to launch the Android Pay app and re-add my three cards, they really weren’t deleted from the device just disabled until I added them back again. So within a minute or so I had all three of my credit cards working again in Android Pay. I use Android Pay every week and it’s so convenient to not carry my wallet every place that I need to shop, I just wish that the retailers would update their POS terminals to accept Android Pay and it’s competitor Apple Pay.
Many companies accept Android Pay (McDonalds, Jamba Juice, Apple, New Seasons) and even banks are starting to accept it. So I’m hopeful that in my lifetime I will no longer have to carry a wallet, rather just a fully charged smart phone with all of my cards connected to Android Pay.
