CES 2024 is a veritable hotbed for exciting smart home developments, and chief among these are Samsung's latest announcements, which demonstrate a keen focus on improving the smart home user experience.
While Matter is already doing much of the groundwork to consolidate and simplify the smart home experience, all the different ecosystems are nonetheless fraught with friction and clunky processes.
To address some of these challenges, Samsung has unveiled three new developments: an improved TV smart home hub experience that could serve to “eliminate” the need for a standalone hub; a new map display function for smart home management; and sharing QR code access. With these latest features, SmartThings will deliver an updated, more user-friendly experience.
A real smart TV
The living room is the beating heart of the home, and thanks to SmartThings' new TV-centric smart home experience, some of the best TVs can also be the heart of your smart home, turning your television into a seamless control center for connected smart home . home devices and doing away with separate smart hubs altogether.
The new quick panel allows you to quickly access key features without compromising your favorite TV shows and movies, such as managing devices, viewing cameras and helping find lost cell phones around the house by calling them.
A similar experience is reflected in the main TV hub, which now presents key information and insights about your connected devices at a glance. Speaking of ringtones, the new SmartThings for TV experience also allows TVs to connect to smartphones, allowing users to use their handhelds as secondary remotes.
Map it out
Another feature coming to SmartThings is the new map view, which can be synced between mobile phones, tablets, TVs and refrigerators, and aims to provide greater smart home control and therefore easier smart home management.
Using a TV or mobile, users can now use Map View to monitor energy consumption, security cameras, room temperature and other data in real time. Map View can integrate actual floor plans or use new AI technology to create a 3D layout of users' homes. If your house plan is available online for free, all you have to do is enter your address and see how it goes. Magic.
The AI fun doesn't stop there; users can also create new AI characters representing household members and even pets, who will respond to the conditions of your home.
Devices that support LiDAR, such as the Samsung Jet Bot robot vacuum cleaner or the newly demonstrated one Ballie AI can also scan the house and create floor plans, with Ballie even identifying compatible devices and placing them in the correct position on the map.
The latest development from Samsung is the new QR Code Access Sharing feature, which allows users to create custom QR codes that grant access to devices around the home and create their personal routines. These can be set to limit device monitoring to specific times, and each QR code can only be used once to prevent bad actors from interfering with your smart home devices.
We cover all the latest CES news of the show as it happens. We cover everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops, smart home gadgets and the latest in AI, so stick with us for the big stories.
And do not forget that follow us on TikTok for the latest news from the CES show floor!