Region Locking on Active Watch

[irishtech]

Hey folks....my girlfriend bought the new Galaxy Active watch for me while on holiday in spain.

But a friend of mine told me not to open it as the Samsung Pay services are region locked.  Will I not be able to use this watch to it's full if it's bought in Spain and I live in the UK & Ireland?

Cheers for any advice folks.

[SjorsK]

Samsung Pay is indeed region related and will only support the area where the product is from. There is no way to change this unfortunately.

This is the reason why I only recommend buying products from your home country, that prevents issues with regionalized settings.

[irishtech]

Wow...disapointing to hear.  Kinda not thinking of the future there eh?  Cheers for the quick reply. 

I think I will return it for an Apple Watch - apple pay is not region locked so much happier with that as a service and if bought in america works in the eu fine.  

[SjorsK]

I prefer to have it slightly less localised. For me the localisation could be useful if I really wanted Samsung pay (Simply import it from another country, open a bank account there and poof. Problem solved ). The benefit of this method is that you know for sure that it is localised for local regulations and that you can use your device elsewhere (The feature set does not change when you cross the border ).

Just some warning regarding the Apple watch. The device itself is vendor-locked. Meaning that its impossible to use with any other vendor than Apple (Besides being a more expensive product). Another superuser of the Community @DickKoster has realised this in the hard way when he recieved his new S10+ Now its just a piece of expensive useless equipment ^^'

[smalul]

Super disappointing to hear.

I don't see why the watch cannot take the region from the samsung device when first connecting to it? 

Very short sighted on Samsung's part.