Samsung has announced a new app, called Samsung Wallet, at its keynote presentation during Samsung Developer's Day event at Mobile World Congress. The app is a place to store all of your event tickets, boarding passes, coupons and membership cards in one place for easy access. If this concept sounds familiar, it's because Samsung Wallet seems to be a near identical copy of Apple's Passbook, which was unveiled as part of iOS 6 last September.
Just like Apple's Passbook, there's nothing to show in the app yet, since the power of Samsung Wallet will be with developers integrating their own apps to work with the wallet. App developers can request access to the Samsung Wallet API from Samsung's official developer page, but the company won't be providing access to the app until March 7th. It'll be more than two months before the public gets its hands on the app, as the general launch is scheduled for May of this year.
Until then, Samsung has an overview and specs for the new app on the developer website, allowing app builders to prep for its upcoming release. However, if Apple's Passbook app is any indicator, Samsung may have some trouble acquiring high user adoption. The new Samsung Wallet app doesn't even take advantage of NFC, despite the company's new partnership with Visa's PayWave service, which would have provided a desirable advantage over Apple's Passbook. According to The Verge, Samsung isn't ruling out future integration, but developers shouldn't base their apps around this functionality.
