Samsung are just as bad. I've got the premium 8000 model. It can share its screen to a mobile device. Except it can't because Samsung don't include this feature on iPhone for whatever reason. So they are penalising me, who bought Samsung premium. Next time I won't repeat this mistake. I'll go for a simpler screen and an Apple TV.
Smart TVs are dumb
21–30 of 94 posts
Re: Smart TVs are dumb
#22It's time for Apple to step in and show everyone how it's done. Of course, once this happens, a lot of people will develop selective amnesia, as it happened with phones.
Too late. Roku's already done it.
Re: Smart TVs are dumb
#23In the last days of Chumby we were doing a lot of work with "Smart TV" platforms from Insignia[BestBuy]/Tivo, LG, Samsung, Vizio, etc, and this problem is (or was as of a year ago) pervasive among almost all the "Smart TV" platforms we developed for. It seemed ludicrous to me that they thought it was okay for your TV to have a 30 second to 2 minute bootup time.
The Samsung TV we had was the only one actually smart enough to be able to turn on and function as a dumb TV nearly instantly prior to the "Smart TV" functionality booting up. Based on various comments here it seems like not every Samsung TV does this, but the one I had access to (I forget the model number) did do this, which was very nice compared to all the others. On the down side, the Samsung's remote control was downright horrific to use and had these oddly modal states where it expected you to type lots of things in using a T9-style keypad despite the unit also having a qwerty keyboard (which only worked in some modes/apps) on the backside.
Developing apps for these things was enough to get me to decide I'd never buy a "Smart TV" as a consumer. It makes way more sense to get a good "Dumb TV" and enhance it via set-top boxes like consoles (The Wii U is quite a nice media player, if slower than it should be), or Roku or such. Not only is the out of the box experience way better this way, but you can much more easily upgrade the set-top box with new features every one or two years whereas there's very little reason to get a new TV less than once every 5-10 years.
Re: Smart TVs are dumb
#24A Samsung Smart TV is similar. I have often ranted aloud to my television about hardware developers considering Single Responsibility when designing. Most of the time I just need my screen to be a screen.
My samsung "smart" tv doesn't load the smart part until you tell it to, so just turning it on and using it like a tv is much faster than the lg one shown in that video.
I wonder how many minutes of my life I've wasted looking at the little "Starting" blurb only to be thwarted by "Updating".
Re: Smart TVs are dumb
#25I once worked on a project that had large hardware and software components. The project was clearly lead by the hardware team - historically the company was a hardware company. At weekly status meetings we would spend 55 minutes talking about the hardware, then there would be 5 minutes for the software.
I don't believe that this has to be inevitable, but I do believe that you can tell whether this is happening by simply using a product.
Re: Smart TVs are dumb
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are tons of TVs that are doing it right. Apple doesn't need to "show everyone how it's done". This particular example is of one manufacturer messing up one product line.
It's unfortunately endemic to the whole industry. My "smart" TV is a Vizio. Really I wish TV manufacturers would offer "monitors" (screens without TV tuners). If one manufacturer goes this way, people who only want a screen for e.g. their Roku might buy that one instead.
Why not just buy a regular computer monitor then ? The lack of large screen sizes ? This I can understand.
Re: Smart TVs are dumb
#27Reminds me of early 'smart' phones.
Re: Smart TVs are dumb
#28One reason to resent the pervasiveness of new technology -- not that it's inherently bad or that we're becoming luddites, but we don't want to deal with each company's separate and probably-shitty implementation of something we can do well on our computers. My refrigerator does not need to tweet. My refrigerator is supposed to keep things cold. That's all I expect from it. I don't want a half-baked inventory manageme…
Eh, I prefer the updates than suffering through bugs that never get fixed because console developers traditionally put at a final release and that was it.
I do agree that in terms of the OS, you get mostly pointless updates there, probably mostly playing a cat and mouse game with people jailbreaking the console. It would be fine except it demands the latest OS version to play a game online.
Re: Smart TVs are dumb
#29With the whole 'built-in Plex' thing that LG TVs had, I was actually pretty interested in getting one. After seeing them in action, I've realized that these people obviously don't test their software in any real circumstances. Companies building 'smart' devices need to ensure that the core interactions people are going to have with their devices are as good as or better than the alternatives. What LG could easily hav…
Maybe I'm weird, but 'smart' to me implies "uses zero energy when not in use".
Re: Smart TVs are dumb
#30Why would anyone need a "smart TV"? I can use the internet better with my laptop. Everyone already has a personal computer, whether it's a laptop or a tablet. The usability is always worse. The only way it's useful to show the internet through a television is to transmit the image from a computer to the television. That's what I and my friends do.