Verifone Carbon Review

The Verifone Carbon POS system isn’t actually available yet, but since it’s a stylish system unveiled with great fanfare at a payments tradeshow, it’s getting plenty of attention. 

If you’re thinking the tent-style design looks a bit familiar, you might be remembering the Poynt system. Indeed, the two have a similar look and similar goal: offer "future-proof" payment acceptance in a modern, sleek design. While some details of the Verifone Carbon aren’t fully clear right now, here’s what we know.

The Carbon system is a dual-screen mobile point of sale terminal. It features a full-size tablet screen (running on Android) that faces you, and a smaller screen that faces your paying customer. It’s portable - no need to tether it to one location within your store or restaurant. It accepts all current forms of payment, including EMV chip cards and contactless payments. It also includes a built-in printer and can optionally support a cash drawer.

Credit Card Processing with Verifone Carbon

Like all Verifone machines, the Carbon is not limited to a particular processor. Your pricing for credit card transactions will be set by the processing company that you use to handle your transactions; it is not set by Verifone. In late autumn 2016, Vantiv and Verifone announced that Vantiv is the first company to support the Carbon system. However, more companies will support it as time goes on.

You can get quotes from processing companies that support Verifone by using this quote request tool.

Other Features

The Verifone Carbon comes equipped with Verifone Commerce, a cloud-based platform that allows you to add apps for your specific business needs. You can choose to enable loyalty programs and customer-facing marketing messages or coupons for regularly-purchased items as well.

Specs

Just looking for the technical details? Here’s what’s available. We’ll update this section as more information about the system becomes available.

Connections
Carbon has a bunch: USB, Ethernet, Wifi, and Bluetooth are all available.

Screen
The Carbon features a scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass screen. Exact size or resolution is not available at this time. The screen is a horizontal orientation, unlike Poynt’s vertical orientation.

Battery Life
Verifone states that a fully-charged Carbon system gets up to 6 hours of battery life.

Equipment and Accessories

The main Carbon system features a built-in printer and a card reading devices for magstripe, EMV, and NFC transactions. Other accessories, like cash drawers, are optionally available.

Verifone Carbon Pricing

The Verifone Carbon system does not have a published MSRP yet. It’s also important to note that the pricing for credit card machines, including POS and mPOS systems, can vary a lot depending on where you buy it. Different processors will likely all set their own pricing for the Carbon, as they do for other Verifone machines.

If you’d like to hear more when Verifone officially releases the Carbon mPOS system, follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates or check this Carbon review and profile regularly.