Samsung Galaxy S3 Olympics phone PayWave video demo

V3 had the chance to test Visa's forthcoming PayWave wireless payment service running on the Samsung Galaxy S3 at the Olympic Park.

Visa confirmed it would be testing its PayWave on Samsung's Olympics phone earlier in the year, listing the S3 as a PayWave certified device.

The service is already available on Visa cards and works using a tiny antenna that is embedded in the card, allowing it to communicate with wireless payment terminals. The technology lets Visa card holders pay for items by holding their card within 5cm of the card reader.

Paywave works the same way on certified smartphones, using NFC technology to allow Visa account holders to wave their devices in front of payments terminals in participating outlets to pay for goods.

The service currently has a £20 per-transaction limit and requires users to add credit to their Paywave account prior to use. The separation between the user's main and Paywave account means that if the phone is stolen criminals won't have free rein over the user's proper bank account.

The enabled version was handed out to athletes participating in the London 2012 games as a way to help test the technology. A wider roll out of the technology is expected later this year.

PayWave is one of many new NFC payment services set to be featured on the Galaxy S3. Orange and Barclaycard confirmed plans to port their Quick Tap wireless technology on to Samsung's Galaxy S3 smartphone earlier in September.

Samsung unveiled the S3 at the start of May at Earl's Court London. It features a powerful 1.5GHz quad-core processor and runs Google's latest Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, Jeally Bean 4.1.

The device boasts a number of custom Samsung features, including S Beam near field communication sharing, S Voice spoken command features and Pop-up Play continuous video playback.

Samsung confirmed S3 is its fastest selling device to date, having broken the 20 million sales milestone a mere 100 days after launching, on Thursday.