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Updated hands-on: Samsung TV remote gets motion control

The company's clicker for its 2014 Smart TVs supports Nintendo Wii-like motion control, offers a smaller trackpad, and has more dedicated buttons than before -- including actual DVR controls. We went hands-on with an early version.

Ty Pendlebury Editor
Ty Pendlebury is a journalism graduate of RMIT Melbourne, and has worked at CNET since 2006. He lives in New York City where he writes about streaming and home audio.
Expertise Ty has worked for radio, print, and online publications, and has been writing about home entertainment since 2004. He majored in Cinema Studies when studying at RMIT. He is an avid record collector and streaming music enthusiast. Credentials
  • Ty was nominated for Best New Journalist at the Australian IT Journalism awards, but he has only ever won one thing. As a youth, he was awarded a free session for the photography studio at a local supermarket.
David Katzmaier Editorial Director -- Personal Tech
David reviews TVs and leads the Personal Tech team at CNET, covering mobile, software, computing, streaming and home entertainment. We provide helpful, expert reviews, advice and videos on what gadget or service to buy and how to get the most out of it.
Expertise A 20-year CNET veteran, David has been reviewing TVs since the days of CRT, rear-projection and plasma. Prior to CNET he worked at Sound & Vision magazine and eTown.com. He is known to two people on Twitter as the Cormac McCarthy of consumer electronics. Credentials
  • Although still awaiting his Oscar for Best Picture Reviewer, David does hold certifications from the Imaging Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology on display calibration and evaluation.
Ty Pendlebury
David Katzmaier
3 min read
The new 2014 clicker has a smaller touchpad and more buttons than the 2013 version. Samsung

LAS VEGAS -- Samsung Electronics recently announced the release of its 2014 Smart Control, the remote included with most of its new Smart TVs, and today we got the chance to try one in-hand.

The updated clicker now supports motion control a la a Nintendo Wiimote or LG Magic Motion wand, and it also includes a touch pad. The touch pad is one-fifth the size of last year's.

It supports a swiping left/right gesture to flick between Samsung Smart Hub panels or content listings across multiple pages. It's now bounded by four directional buttons enabling users to "access their content more accurately."

For reference, Samsung's 2013 remote. Sarah Tew/CNET

After a few minutes playing with a preproduction version at CES, we can report it is indeed better than last year's. Resting your thumb on the touch pad tells the remote to engage motion control mode, summoning up a cursor you can direct quickly and accurately around the screen. It works just like LG's remote (or a Wii), but I really appreciated the ease with which I could enter and exit motion mode.

One big reason I liked LG's interface so much last year was because motion control eased use of the "virtual remote" -- the little pop-up on-screen clicker that includes all the functions they decided to eliminate as buttons from the actual physical remote (like "Set-top box menu" and "DVR list"). Choosing and clicking one of those buttons was much easier and more natural than it was on last year's Samsung Smart TVs, thanks to motion control and more selections on the virtual clicker. Not as easy as hitting an actual button, but better than before.

The extra physical buttons are also very welcome. We complained quite a bit about the lack of dedicated, DVR-friendly "transport" controls for play, fast-forward, and rewind on the 2013 remote, and Samsung listened. The updated clicker returns with these old faves, although it's still missing forward and reverse skip.

In my closed-door demo I advocated hard for Samsung to add those to the final version, replacing the "MTS" and "CC" buttons. If that happens, I expect you all to thank me. The company's designers and engineers assured me the final choice of buttons was still up for debate.

One notable dedicated button that will be included is Multi-Link Screen, said to enable "users to watch multiple contents simultaneously on a single screen." It puts live TV on one side and an app or Web page on the other. In my demo that feature worked well too, and I appreciated that the non-TV half of the split screen could read the TV half's metadata, automatically initiating a YouTube or Web search based on what show you're watching.

Arguably the biggest change is the new shape, which mimics the pebble design of Samsung's old mini-remotes and comes with a textured grip on the underside. It felt "right" in the hand, and again reminded me of a refined version of the LG wand.

As in previous years, the remote includes a microphone for content searching and playback control using "natural language." Like, you know, "Hi, TV!" It's also Bluetooth, so you don't need line-of-sight to the TV.

Check out more on Samsung's 2014 TV releases at CES 2014.

Correction: An earlier version of this story, based on Samsung's somewhat unclear initial press release, said that the remote wouldn't have motion control. In fact, it does. The mockup above includes a Soccer button, which the earlier version of this story derided. The preproduction version I played with lacked that button, so I've reluctantly removed my derision--for now.