Square’s New Handheld Payment Scanner Looks Like a Phone

Square has a new way for merchants to take your money: a new handheld device.

The payment company’s little white pucks, touchscreen terminals, and portable wedges already crowd the world of contactless point-of-sale payments; you’ve probably swiped or tapped on a Square gadget countless times at cafés, retail stores, and farmer’s markets.

The slick new phone-like handset is meant for servers, sellers, or anyone working in customer service to carry around and use to collect payments or put in orders. It is called, wait for it, Square Handheld. It costs $399 and is available now.

Square says more than 4 million sellers already use its hardware and services in their businesses—point-of-sale terminals, payment processors, and inventory management tools that aim to keep a business running. (Square takes a cut of the transactions for its trouble.)

In April, Square announced it was smashing all of its various services into a single point-of-sale app. The Square Handheld is another effort to further synergize those capabilities, packing everything into a slim device that can also process payments directly via a card reader.

Servers at restaurants can take a table’s order by tapping on the screen.

Courtesy of Square

Square is operated by Block, the financial tech company that also runs CashApp and AfterPay. Thomas Templeton, Block’s head of hardware, says the effort behind the Square Handheld was to make a device that would both integrate with the service’s software and inventory management systems and be easy to carry around. Portable barcode scanners can be big and bulky, or connected with a wire that can make moving them around a hassle. This little fella is wireless and has the familiar look and feel of a chunky smartphone.

“Portability is getting more important,” Templeton says.

The Square handheld is half an inch thick, weighs less than three quarters of a pound, and connects wirelessly to the Square system. So a server can carry around the device in their pocket, pull it out to take an order, then send that order to the kitchen without having to go back and plug the order into another computer.