Samsung brings apps, video conferencing to smart TVs
Smart TVs that let you use video conference and use apps were the highlight of Samsung's CES presentation.
Forget about the Super Bowl. Samsung is bringing Angry Birds to the TV this year.
Samsung announced at the Consumer Electronics Show today that its flagship smart TVs for this year will allow people to easily move between TV programs and applications.
"It's the first TV to feature an Angry Birds on-demand animated channel, on 2010, 2011 and 2012 Samsung smart TVs, and for free," Samsung Electronics America President Tim Baxter said during the company's press conference in Las Vegas.
The dual-core processor allows for multi-tasking. "Say you're watching a movie on Netflix and you want to check in on movie highlights," he said. You can just toggle "without having to quit the app and relaunch another app," he added.
Samsung is adding a Smart Media Hub on its TVs, as well. Customers will be able to put content on one media device and watch it on all Samsung devices, according to Baxter.
The company also will be offering 3D capability in TVs, such as with the PNE8000 and the UNES6500 series. In addition, Samsung is integrating cameras and microphones into high-end smart TVs to allow for Kinect-style voice and gesture recognition. This will allow people to do video conferencing on the devices.
Meanwhile, Samsung also wowed the crowd at CES when it showed off the its new 55-inch super OLED TV. "This is the TV you've dreamed about," Baxter said. No pricing was announced.
The TV has clear quality, with OLED pixels that emit their own light, so that even details in dark scenes are seen, Samsung officials said. (Read "'Ultimate' Samsung LED TV still lacks full-array backlight" for more on the picture quality.) And Samsung's UNES7100 series LED TVs are getting a slim bezel and micro dimming.
The company also announced smart cameras and camcorders and added more Wi-Fi to its point-and-shoot cameras for saving photos to a computer or to a cloud-based storage site, like Samsung's AllShare Play.
Samsung also unveiled the Android-based Galaxy Note, which comes with 4G LTE, and the Galaxy Tab 7.7 LTE on Verizon's 4G network, with a media hub and infrared technology, as well as the sleek Series 9 laptop and the Series 5 Ultra notebooks.