Preview of Square, A Credit Card Reader

At first, this little device might be confusing since it plugs into the iPhone’s headphone/microphone jack and it’s not a speaker or microphone; it’s a credit card reader. I’m assuming that it reads the magnetic strip on the card by creating tones/different frequencies and feeds them through the mic port and into the app that’s running. It doesn’t use a battery as far as I can tell either so it must draw power off the headphone jack. This is a bit different than most other readers we’ve seen. Others use the dock connection to connect the card reader. [Read more…]