It’s a crowd-funded initiative, so there’s a possibility that it will never see the light of day, but Fit Pay has put together a strap that lets you pay with your wrist in most places you could use a credit card. This NFC-ready strap looks almost indistinguishable from a normal Pebble strap, but you can load a number of credit cards or debit cards onto it and look like a wizard in your local grocery store.
The strap itself is called the Pagaré, and it was developed for Pebble Time devices by Fit Pay, a startup tech company that is focusing heavily on new payment methods and which just secured $3.1 million in funding from investors. The Pagaré will put Pebble in competitive waters with both the Apple Watch and the Samsung Gear S2 (once it gets its payment capabilities sorted out). Where this tech aims to snare an advantage over these two devices is the strap-located NFC chip, which means you don’t have to twist your wrist into an unnatural position to get it to register.
Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that we’ll be seeing the Pagaré on the mobile market. At the time of writing, Fit Pay has secured nearly $40,000 of its $120,000 goal with 644 backers, and there are still 29 days to go so the odds look good. Nevertheless, if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Kickstarted tech projects, it’s that you can’t ever put too much hope in them. Early supporters can throw $49 at the project and get themselves a Pagaré smartstrap to go with their Pebble Time. If you kick that up to $199, you’ll get the Pagaré and a Pebble time to boot. Throw in an additional $50, and they’ll upgrade your Pebble Time into a Time Steel or a Time Round. Once the project makes, the company is hoping to ship Pagarés as early as July.
What are your thoughts regarding this payment-savvy smartstrap? Let us know if you think it’s worth the apparent $49 price tag in the comments below!
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