Samsung’s Newest Tablet Is Just a Big Remote for Your Smart Home

Samsung is constant its quest to make its SmartIssues platform your sensible residence app of selection, overhauling the interface, making the platform extra pleasant to tinkerers, and even bundling it with the corporate’s line of fancy Bespoke kitchen appliances.

Now the corporate is making a standalone display for controlling the sensible residence. Called the Home Hub, it’s a a docked pill—consider the common distant management from again within the satellite tv for pc TV days. (Which, uh, wasn’t that way back.)

You can use the Home Hub to show off your Samsung TV, test in your home equipment’ standing, and monitor their vitality use. The Home Hub will provide the identical features because the SmartIssues app in your smartphone and work with different Samsung providers, like SmartThings Cooking and Samsung’s Clothing Care system.

To put it extra merely: in case you’re planning on going all-in with Samsung in your house, the Home Hub will unite all of it. The pill is debuting in Korea first, however in fact you may at all times use the app in your cellphone and tright here’s nonetheless the third-party SmartIssues hub from Aeotec which you can purchase now that can assist you get issues synced up. Samsung’s Home Hub is supposed to be a supplemental sensible residence system fairly than a alternative for current gadgets.

The Home Hub might be appropriate with not-yet-released Matter commonplace. Samsung has publicly dedicated to supporting Matter as soon as gadgets turn into out there in 2022.

Samsung’s SmartIssues linked residence platform is nearly a decade previous. But regardless of the sprawling existence of digital assistants and sensible shows, it nonetheless feels just like the “home of the future” is struggling to search out its footing.

The Home Hub gives a little bit of an edge over Google and Amazon’s voice-first sensible residence platforms. Samsung is leaning into what it does finest—making {hardware}. Interestingly, it’s going the bodily system route fairly than pushing onerous on its digital assistant, Bixby, which nonetheless exists however nobody makes use of. A devoted pill with the SmartIssues app entrance and middle additionally looks like it could even be extra approachable for those that don’t like to make use of a voice assistant and need a devoted distant management for his or her sensible residence.

Samsung additionally introduced at CES 2022 that it’s a founding member of the Home Connectivity Alliance, or HCA, which it began “to ensure that having devices across multiple brands doesn’t require you to compromise your smart home experience.” This group of corporations might be separate from the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), the committee serving to launch Matter and the place Samsung can also be a member.

You could be questioning how it’s in any respect helpful for shoppers for an additional alliance to be engaged on sensible residence interoperability when Matter nonetheless hasn’t launched, and, properly, that half remains to be unclear.