The new Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro is not the phone for me, but it does make a compelling case as a good phone for merchants who want a mobile POS. COTS (“commercial off-the-shelf”) is a thing we’ve been looking at in the payments industry for a while now, and the concept is pretty damn cool.

The short of it is that instead of using a hardware device to accept credit cards from your customers, you can use the NFC chip on your phone to act as the “tap-to-pay” point in your POS. This removes the need to plug anything into your phone or pair anything over Bluetooth, and for merchants who just want to get paid with as few complications as possible, this is super compelling.

The great thing about this phone is that it ships with support for COTS. The bad news is that, as far as I know, there are no major payment gateways that support this in their apps yet, so it’s not going to be super useful for many people today. But the good news is that because this is out there, it hopefully indicates that more phones will follow suit. As always, we’re mostly waiting on Apple to enable this on the iPhone to make it go truly mainstream. We shall see…