Samsung is releasing two new laptops sporting its QLED display technology, previewing its Galaxy Home speaker a full year after its first unveiling, and expanding its Bixby virtual assistant through its Tizen TV platform now available to third-party manufacturers.
Set to ship early 2020, the Galaxy Book Flex and the Galaxy Book Ion are touted as the first laptops with QLED displays, available in both 13 and 15-inch models, in either a royal blue or silver finish.
Incredibly thin, and light, the ultrabooks have been split into two categories – the Galaxy Book Flex is Samsung’s 2-in-1 laptop sporting a 360-degree hinged screen with a dedicated S Pen for drawing and writing, while the Galaxy Book Ion is a standard clamshell laptop made of lighter magnesium than the aluminium of the Flex.
Both laptops are a part of Intel’s Project Athena, which has allowed the chipmaker to work closes with Samsung to engineer and design “halo” flagship devices.
One of the significant features included in both Samsung laptops is embedded wireless charging pad located underneath the touchpad which can be used to charge any Qi-compatible device.
Both devices will join the Samsung Galaxy S10 under “Project Limitless”, using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx for all-day battery life, Intel 10th-gen chips, Intel integrated GPUs as well as the option of an Nvidia GeForce MX250 GPU in the 15-inch versions.
The Galaxy Book Ion also comes with a user-serviceable extra slot for expandability across both memory and storage, not featured on the Flex.
Moving onto leaks and previews, the rumoured Galaxy Home speaker was shown off at Samsung’s annual developer conference, leaving us to wonder exactly when this product will officially launch to consumers.
Looking like a hybrid between the original Amazon Echo Dot and a Google Home Mini, the Samsung Galaxy smart speaker sports the AKG logo in the middle, a brand used by Samsung for the manufacturing of its Galaxy buds.
Unfortunately, the Bixby powered device is unlikely to arrive anytime soon as the speaker was originally due to launch in Q3 this year after being announced in 2018.
SamMobile who visited the event said there was barely a mention of the new speaker during the keynote, squashing hopes of long-awaited speaker entering households.
No clue when this is going to ship, but the @Samsung Galaxy Home Mini is on display in the demo area here at #SDC2019 pic.twitter.com/XplcTklnqs
— Avi Greengart (@greengart) October 29, 2019
On the other hand, what has been launched and made available by Samsung is its smart TV platform Tizen TV to third party manufacturers.
Taking a page out of both Roku and Apple’s playbook, Samsung will now allow third-party manufacturers to install its Tizen TV smart software, adding to the over 100 million TVs currently supporting the platform.
Unfortunately, there were no additional details from Samsung regarding which manufacturers the Tizen TV platform would be extended to.
The extension of its Tizen TV platform is a part of the Samsungs expansion of the Bixby Marketplace, the South Korean company’s virtual assistant.
Come 2020, ‘ the Bixby Marketplace will expand gradually, enabling developers to offer their services across more Samsung devices’, with enhanced capabilities in the Bixby Developer Studio at SDC19.
The push from Samsung appears to be a focus on a ‘secure and connected ecosystem’ clearly an attempt to mirror the effectiveness and efficiency of the Apple ecosystem.
Samsung will be expanding it’s One UI 2′ beyond smartphones to tablets, wearables, and new form factors, including foldable phones.
