The Galaxy S10's fancy LED case disables the phone's NFC

As we were admiring the LED cover in person at MWC, we decided to check if a suspicion we had about the intricate case will prove to be true. And sadly, it did.

According to the message that shows up when you turn on the LEDs of the case “NFC isn’t available while using Light control”. This means that as long as the LED functionality of the cover is used, the NFC on your Galaxy S10 phone will automatically be turned off. That means no Samsung Pay, Google Pay, or any other features that rely on NFC to function. Whenever you want to use it, you’d have to go to the LED cover menu and literally turn off the lights.

Of course, the circuitry embedded in the case to make the LEDs work is the culprit to blame for this unfortunate drawback. Whenever power is running through it, it's likely interfering with the NFC signal, so for safe measure, Samsung decided to disable it completely.

To be fair, that’s really only a drawback if you use NFC often and the hassle of turning the cover LEDs on and off would be too much. But from our observations, most people aren’t that deep into an NFC ecosystem yet. For those that are, however, this means they’ll have to rely on a cover without mood lighting. What a bummer!

These cases aren’t available for purchase yet, so there is a slight chance that the final version will allow both the LEDs and NFC to work at the same time, but we wouldn’t bet on it.