Samsung's "smart" televisions have received ongoing coverage here at the news section of the Embedded Vision Alliance website, since their unveiling at January's Consumer Electronics Show. Although I thought they'd gone into production earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD chief, Walt Mossberg, recently tried out the top-end $2,000 (after rebate) 46" ES8000 model…and wasn't seemingly at all impressed with the vision-implemented user interface features. Check out these choice quotes from his writeup, "Samsung’s Smart TV Isn’t As Smart As It Thinks It Is," published earlier today:
I found the new Smart Interaction—voice, gesture and facial recognition—unreliable and awkward. Many of the key apps, including Facebook, Twitter and the Web browser, seemed crude and hard to use without a keyboard, which Samsung sells for about $100.
Gestures were similarly [editor note: he'd previously been criticizing the TV's voice recognition facilities] frustrating. You’re supposed to enable them by just waving your hand toward the camera, but this often failed. When it didn’t, I found using gestures to navigate among apps on the Smart Hub screen to be cumbersome. The exception was “Angry Birds.” It worked well with gestures.
Face recognition—mostly used as an alternate to a password for logging into Samsung’s Internet services—failed for me utterly, even when I left my chair and squatted with my face lined perfectly up to the camera just a few feet away. Even the guy conducting Samsung’s online tutorials for Smart Interaction (at http://bit.ly/PYs1Dr) suffered some embarrassing failures in a video series called, ironically, “Keep It Simple.”
How's that saying go…if at first you don't succeed, try try again?
