Poynt launched a portable, Android-based PoS device with 7- and 4.3-inch touchscreens, plus WiFi, BLE, 4G, NFC, and EMV, plus a printer and card scanner. Point-of-Sale (PoS) devices have increasingly gone portable, such as the Linux-based USAT ePort G10. Now a startup called Poynt, formed by former Google Wallet and PayPal executive Osama Bedier, has unveiled one of the most advanced — and coolest looking — mobile terminals yet with its Poynt Smart Terminal. The device features both merchant- and customer-facing touchscreens, both with higher resolution than typical PoS devices, and offers a wide variety of wireless and imaging payment technologies. Poynt Smart Terminal (click images to enlarge) The Poynt Smart Terminal is now open for pre-orders at $299. It will be available as a $499 development kit in December and as a final product in early 2015, says the company. The eventual retail price will be $499.

“From Google Wallet and Apple Pay to QR codes and Bitcoin, merchants are increasingly confused as to what’s relevant and what may be a waste of money,” states Bedier in the Poynt blog. “That’s why we support all five payment technologies needed for the next decade — magnetic stripe, chip cards, NFC, QR code and beacon — all directly within the device, no add-ons or dongles needed.” Poynt Smart Terminal architecture diagram (click image to enlarge) Bedier notes that the Poynt Smart Terminal fully supports the coming “EMV” (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) standard for credit card payments. Visa and MasterCard have set an EMV mandate to require 16 million U.S. payment terminals to support EMV by Oct. 2015. This smart card system, which uses EMV chips like NFC and does not require a signature, is widely used around the world except for the U.S. Not coincidentally, the U.S. is home to half the world’s credit card fraud, despite the fact that it represents only a quarter of credit card transactions, according to the Wall Street Journal. Poynt detail view, Merchant screen (click image to enlarge) The Poynt Smart Terminal runs a forked version of Android 4.4.4 called PoyntOS on an unnamed quad-core processor, accompanied by a dedicated secure co-processor featuring end-to-end encryption. No details were supplied about memory or storage. The device has two touchscreens: The 7-inch, merchant-facing display offers 1280 x 800-pixel resolution, while the 4.3-inch customer-facing screen is listed at 800 x 480. Poynt detail view, Customer screen (click image to enlarge) Communications features include WiFi, Bluetooth LE (BLE), and 3G/4G, including a GSM antenna. There’s also an Ethernet port and an NFC (near field communication) radio with an antenna that surrounds the customer-facing screen for easy access.

Other payment technologies include EMV, a magnetic stripe reader (MSV), and a QR-code and bar code scanner. A merchant-facing camera is also noted, along with a microphone speaker, thermal printer, and eight-hour battery.

The Poynt Smart Terminal’s PoyntOS, now available in beta, integrates Android with RESTful APIs for cloud integration. The embedded/cloud architecture also integrates security, payments and commerce services. The PoyntOS SDK, supports the development of third-party applications. Poynt recommends that developers augment the SDK with Android Studio with “gradle build toolkit,” as well as the Genymotion emulator. Poynt UI screens (click images to enlarge) The device ships with three core apps. The Terminal app connects to a merchant’s pre-existing cash register as a companion to automate transactions. The Register app allows Poynt to run as an all-in-one device by connecting to a cash drawer and replacing the traditional cash register. An analytics tool called Copilot runs on the device as well on a mobile app so merchants can keep tabs on transactions in real-time, even from a remote location.

Poynt announced six initial software partners that will develop applications: Vend, Kabbage, Swarm, Boomtown, Bigcommerce, and Intuit.

The Poynt Smart Terminal is open for pre-orders at $299, or $499 for the developer version. The device will ship in early 2015, at which point the consumer retail price will change to $499. More information may be found at the Poynt website.  

I am interested in the Poynt Smart Terminal.

I would like to receive volume pricing on the units as well as the technical datasheet or specification.

Also include the various hardware configurations that the unit can be purchased in.