Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s new mobile payments service Samsung Pay launched in the United States Monday and although offering by far the best solution in the market, it does launch with some limitations that could make it hard to grow a serious presence.

The new service, which launched first in South Korea last month, comes to market following Samsung’s acquisition of LoopPay, Inc. in February, a company that delivered what on paper should be a killer feature: not only does Samsung Pay support near field communications (NFC) as services such as Apple Pay and Android Pay do, it also provides support for magnetic stripe cards, meaning it will work with legacy point of sales (POS) terminals as well as new ones so immediately the service work at virtually any place that takes Mastercard and Visa.

However, that’s where the big advantage ends and although the service will work a treat if you can get it, getting it will be half the battle.

From launch, Samsung Pay only works with Samsung’s top of the range phones: the Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, Note 5 and the S6+. So users of older, or lesser model Samsung phones won’t be able to use it either now or any time into the future, whereas in most cases they are able to use Android Pay.

Verizon users are also unable to use the service as Samsung has yet to come to an agreement with the company, but users of other networks including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and others won’t have a problem.

Bank providers are still somewhat limited as well: yes, users can use Visa and Mastercard through the service but still need to have their issuing bank on board, and at this stage that lists stands at three: US Bank, Citi, Bank of America, as well as support for cards issued directly by American Express.

A shame

Although the limitations on what phones Samsung Pay would be available on from the beginning (only the later phones received the tech from LoopPay) were known, the other things combined with this can only draw a sigh; it’s a shame really that potentially on paper what was a killer service has launched with support that is anything but.

Despite not having support for as many POS terminals, hands down Android Pay is the best mobile payments service on the market available today for Android users and more importantly comes with a potential audience multiple times bigger than Samsung could ever dream about.

If you’ve got a supported phone and are interested in giving the service a try, you can sign up to it here.

For those outside the United States and interested, so far Samsung has said that they want to bring Pay to China, Spain and the United Kingdom in the future, but have yet to commit to a date.

Image credit: Samsung