Apple and UnionPay Will Bring Apple Pay To China In Early 2016

Today Apple and China UnionPay announced plans to bring support for Apple Pay to China by the beginning of 2016. China UnionPay is the only bank card organization in China, and so partnering with them was essential to Apple expanding the Apple Pay service to the country. Apple Pay is Apple’s mobile payment service that utilizes NFC and either an iPhone or an Apple Watch to make mobile payments at merchants that have the necessary payment terminals to support contactless payments.

At launch, Apple Pay will be available on 15 of China’s leading banks. It’s not specified exactly which banks have signed on for the original roll out, but if the service expands in the way it has in the United States that number will end up growing fairly quickly. The launch of the service will be subject to approvals by Chinese regulators, which could cause delays to Apple’s planned roll out timeline. With China UnionPay having issued bank cards for hundreds of millions of customers, the expansion to China could potentially provide a big boost to the number of users using the service. The expansion into China also makes sense when one considers Apple’s recent attempts to gain a better foothold in the Chinese market.

As for Apple Pay in general, the launch of Apple Pay in China will mark the fifth expansion of the service. It originally launched exclusively in the United States before expanding to the United Kingdom, and it was recently introduced in Australia and Canada through a partnership with American Express.

The Google Nexus 6P Review

As we have come to know, Google has opted to simultaneously release two Nexus smartphone devices this year. Alongside the smaller form-factor LG Nexus 5X which we’ve reviewed a couple of weeks ago, we also find the larger Huawei-built Nexus 6P. …

The OnePlus 2 Review

In early 2014, there was a lot of excitement among Android enthusiasts for an upcoming smartphone called the OnePlus One. The company producing it was a Chinese manufacturer, and they were a new entrant to the smartphone space. OnePlus’s marketing campaign was structured to generate excitement over the prospect of receiving similar specifications to a high end smartphone in a device that was priced substantially lower. Once the device launched, it was clear that OnePlus had delivered on that promise in some respects, but not as much in others. The performance and display quality were superb for a $300-350 device, but parts of the software and the camera processing were clearly lacking.

While the OnePlus One wasn’t perfect, there really aren’t any smartphones that are. For $300-350, it certainly offered users shopping on a budget a lot of power for their money. With many aspects of the phone already being executed well, one would expect that OnePlus’s next phone would serve to iron out the issues and improve on some of the original’s failings. That brings us to 2015, with the OnePlus 2 serving as the new flagship smartphone from OnePlus. Read on for the full review of the OnePlus 2, and find out if it holds up as well as its predecessor.