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After a false start yesterday, Android Pay is now live in the United Kingdom. Those with compatible credit and debit cards can set up the contactless payment service after downloading the app from the Play Store. Google has also announced that Android Pay is coming soon to Australia and Singapore.

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Update 5/18: Android Pay has officially launched in the UK. Coming soon to Australia and Singapore.

Update: As many have pointed out, the app is not yet in the Play Store. Google has since pulled the original tweet and commented that Android Pay in the UK is “not quite there yet”. An official announcement will likely coincide with I/O tomorrow.

After announcing plans for Android Pay’s first international expansion in March, Google’s contactless payment service is now available in the United Kingdom. According to the official Android Twitter account, those in the country can now download the app and set up the service.

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Following signs that a UK rollout is imminent, the Sydney Morning Herald has reported that Australian banks ANZ and Westpac are preparing to launch Android Pay in the next couple of months. Google’s contactless payment system has seen a slower international release compared to competitors.

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Apple for a time led the tech market in education, even making education-specific Mac models. More recently, the company made a big push on iPads, signing a $30M deal (that would eventually have been worth a quarter of a billion dollars) in 2013 to equip every student in the LA Unified School District with an iPad.

If that program had succeeded, it would have created a template for rolling out similar ones across the whole of the USA. Instead, it failed catastrophically, and it now appears that Chromebooks are winning where iPads have failed.

CNBC reported last month that Chromebooks now make up more than half of all devices in U.S. classrooms, while Apple’s share of classroom purchases more than halved between 2012 and 2015. Why is that, and what – if anything – can Apple do to reverse the trend … ?

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Samsung has said that a hack at LoopPay reported in the New York Times did not compromise any of its customer data. LoopPay’s technology forms part of the company’s electronic wallet offering, Samsung Pay.

Samsung Pay was not impacted and at no point was any personal payment information at risk. This was an isolated incident that targeted the LoopPay office network, which is a physically separate network from Samsung Pay. The LoopPay incident was resolved and had nothing to do with Samsung Pay … 

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Lobbying group Citizens for Tax Justice has called out Google, Apple and Microsoft and others for what it described as “accounting tricks” in which companies “pretend” to be based overseas for tax purposes. The claims were made in a report entitled Offshore Shell Games 2015.

Many multinational corporations use accounting tricks to pretend for tax purposes that a substantial portion of their profits are generated in offshore tax havens, countries with minimal or no taxes where a company’s presence may be as little as a mailbox. Multinational corporations’ use of tax havens allows them to avoid an estimated $90 billion in federal income taxes each year.

Google’s overseas tax arrangements came under fire in the UK back in 2013 when it was revealed that the company paid just £6M ($9.4M) on a UK turnover of £395M ($620M), claiming that all its advertising sales were made by staff in Ireland (a claim later challenged) …

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Samsung has announced that its mobile wallet service Samsung Pay has been used for more than $30M worth of transactions in its first month in the company’s home market of Korea. The company says that the number “has been beyond our expectations.”

Samsung devices are hugely popular within Korea, and the WSJ notes that the “launch was boosted by a massive advertising campaign,” so this doesn’t necessarily suggest that it will see achieve similar take-up in the U.S. when it launches on Monday – especially given the limited number of Samsung devices that support it … 
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Leading up to Apple’s eagerly anticipated keynote presentation last night, Sony had a jab prepared for the iPhone-makers before they unveiled the iPhone 6s, Apple TV and iPad Pro. It seems, however, Sony wasn’t the only manufacturer attempting to rain on Apple’s parade. Arguably Apple’s biggest competitor, Samsung had a few of its own jibes to share with us and took to its UK Twitter handle to publish them…

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In one of the most ambiguous rebuttals of recent memory, Samsung has denied reports claiming it is looking to reduce its workforce by 10%. It’s not reducing its workforce, it says, but “relocating” them. One of Samsung’s high-ranking officials spoke to Yonhap News, claiming that it will “only be relocating workers”, denying rumors that it was looking to move on 10 percent of its management staff in sales and PR. What it didn’t say was what “relocating” actually means, leaving us speculating a number of possible translations for the phrase…

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Battered mobile technology manufacturer HTC has a new press event scheduled for September 29, to be held in Hankone, Japan, where a “double flagship” device will be released. That’s according to an image spotted by popular Twitter user @upleaks, who says in his tweet that the image was posted to HTC’s account on Weibo, the Chinese social networking equivalent to Twitter…
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The WSJ is reporting that Amazon is going to strip down a 6-inch tablet and sell it for $50 for the holidays. What’s amazing is that the theoretically color tablet was cheaper to make than even an ebook display version:

Mr. Bezos had set an internal goal of the $50 price tag for versions of both the Fire tablet and Kindle e-reader, viewing the rock-bottom prices as a crucial lure for a more cost-conscious group of buyers, the people said. But the e-reader screen technology from its vendors ultimately proved too expensive to drop the retail price, the people said. Amazon’s cheapest Kindle sells for $79.

It is likely that the $50 Tablet will be a pared down version of the already minimalist $99 6-inch Kindle which has gone on sale for as little at $69 in recent months. The report cites a mono speaker as one of the cost cutting initiatives but the company will likely drop things like cameras, display quality and battery life.

What might be more interesting to me is that Amazon is said to have fired many from its FireOS group in the wake of the Fire Phone flop and subsequent $170M writedown…
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The latest data from Kantar Worldpanel shows that Samsung and Apple continue to dominate the U.S. smartphone market, taking a massive 64% of the total market share between them, and accounting for nine of the ten best-selling models.

If share alone was not enough to demonstrate market dominance, our data also shows that these two vendors sold nine of the top ten best-selling smartphones in the three months ending July 2015 – with LG making a cameo appearance in the ranking.

Android increased its U.S. market share by 1.7% in the 12 months ending in July this year, though dropped 7% in Japan and 4.1% in Europe … 
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Android Wear finally has iOS support after Google pushed its iPhone-compatible software to the App Store. This means that Android has beaten Apple Watch to the cross-platform game. Or, at least it would, if iOS didn’t restrict it to a state of almost uselessness. The only device officially supported is the LG Watch Urbane although — as we previously revealed — the older generation Android Wear watches do work. I got it set up with my Moto 360, and have been mostly disappointed by my experience so far.

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Update: Google has posted a vague tweet to its Android account on Twitter, presumably in response to these reports. It simply says to “stay tuned” and ends with a #soon hashtag. Hard to draw many assumptions.

Android Pay will not go live today despite signals of otherwise from major fast-food chain Subway, and a purported leaked staff memo from McDonald’s, TechCrunch is now reporting.

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New data from Gartner suggests that Samsung saw its worldwide sales fall by 5.3% year-on-year, its market share dropping from 26.2% in Q2 2014 to 21.9% in the same quarter this year. The company lost ground to both Apple and Chinese brands Huawei and Xiaomi.

Despite the launch of new S6 models, Samsung’s premium phones continued to be challenged by Apple’s large-screen iPhones. Samsung lost 4.3 percentage points in market share and declined 5.3 percent in unit sales in the second quarter of 2015.

Samsung was hit hardest by Huawei, which saw sales growth of 46.3%, followed by Apple, which increased its sales by 36% … 
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Is it happening again? It might be happening again. Verizon Wireless is still evaluating whether or not to support Samsung’s soon-to-be-launched mobile payments service, Samsung Pay, on its devices, according to a representative we spoke with from the company.

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Samsung Pay in action (via <a href="http://www.engadget.com" target="_blank">Engadget</a>)

In addition to announcing new Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note5 smartphones today at its event, the South Korean handset maker has announced the official launch date for its mobile payment service called Samsung Pay. Samsung Pay was first demoed at an event in March and works differently than Google’s OS-level Android Pay as it uses Magnetic Secure Transmission technology based on its LoopPay acquisition that makes it widely compatible with point-of-sale terminals.

Starting a week from today, Samsung Pay will go live for the first time in South Korea enabling mobile payments from compatible Samsung devices. Following the initial rollout, Samsung Pay will go live in the United States starting September 28th.

In addition to launching in South Korea and the United States, Samsung says it’s targeting the UK, Spain, and China as the next markets to launch its mobile payment service. The mobile payment service was initially expected to go live earlier this summer.

As for availability, Samsung Pay is “preloaded on select Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note5 devices” while a software update coming this month will add support on Galaxy S6 and S6 edge phones. Additionally, Samsung says it will launch a limited beta for Galaxy S6, S6 edge, S6 edge+ and Note5 phones starting August 25th. Full press release below:

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