We just finished with Samsung’s press conference and well, that was some time we’ll never get back. It’s not that there weren’t new features and new products, but let’s talk about what there wasn’t:
There wasn’t any sort of differently shaped TV’s: Contrary to Samsung’s early announcements and the media hype, there wasn’t any sort of fancy new TV shape, just a TV in a tilting frame that looks kinda nice.
There wasn’t a transparent TV either. Again, this was a media-driven rumor that never materialized.
There wasn’t any mention of RVU. Samsung was supposed to be the RVU pioneer but they certainly aren’t crowing about the technology any more. It will probably be in the new 2013 Smart TVs but who knows when they’ll get certified?
On the other hand, the new Smart Hub looks kind of neat. It does feature a much better search, which was one of our real concerns about the future of smart TV. The TV also has enough get-up-and-go in its quad core processors to end the persistent waiting that comes with the Smart TV experience (at least from demos, anyway.) They ad more streaming options as well.
Most likely to be vaporware: Samsung showed a dongle that will give your 2012 smart TV all the features of the 2013s. They call it the “Evolution Kit.” We’re not holding our collective breaths to see if that one is going to show up. They also claim they’ll have some sort of feature that lets two people watch two different things when there’s a 3DTV. Of course both people will have to wear glasses, which kind of takes the fun out of things. That’s another vaporware candidate.
It also looks like you can use pretty much anything with a Samsung logo and an LCD screen to share programming from your TV, as long as everything you buy is made in 2013 or later of course. Not sure about the real benefit of streaming netflix to your refrigerator but it’s good for a laugh when company’s in town.
Samsung also pledges that they really, really are going to produce that OLED TV this year. They promise. Honest, it’s not like the last time when they just said they were going to produce it.
In case Samsung’s presentation didn’t leave you totally cold by the way, they also wanted to talk about their refrigerators (ba dum crash.) They look pretty smooth but hey, it’s a refrigerator, what are you going to say.
That’s pretty much it folks, Samsung got a lot of buzz from this blog and others and in the end delivered some evolutionary stuff but nothing like what we hoped. We’ll be on the show floor soon and ready to ask some pressing questions.
