Samsung has a new look

SAMSUNG HELD A press conference to a packed house at CES, and the most significant thing they showed off was a new color scheme. The rest was more of the same, nothing outstanding, nothing bad.

The theme of the conference was 3Cs, Connectivity, Content and Creativity. Samsung wants everything to hook up to everything else, they want the content to play from all sources, and they want you to be able to do interesting things with it. They have not realized that until they ditch DRM entirely, it is bound to be as successful as VIIV. That said, Samsung had some neat things to show, but the overall themes were not totally met.

The most significant part was the new look of the TVs. Samsung is rightfully proud of the old 'Piano Black' finish, and one look around the show floor shows how much it has been copied. The new look is quite different, and unlike the old, it kind of changes with the light. It is branded ToC or Touch of Color.

The color is a pleasing off-brown covered with a clear front,. It changes with the light and has a glowy quality to it. You will be seeing a lot of this in the near future, just like the last finish. I am not immediately turned off by it, and see some up sides, so it will probably grow on me in short order.

Next they used those TVs for their wireless connectivity demo, having a camcorder wirelessly put up pics on the TV, and you can control it from the TV remote. This is the connectivity part, and it extends to MP3 players and other bits. The part that they don't get is that it is connectivity between certain Samsung parts, not a standard. Until they get the standard part down, the rest is doomed, walled gardens don't work.

The TVs themselves are quite neat, the new ones are called the 7 series, and many of them have what is called Infolink, basically an RSS feed that will pull in info from the net. The TVs have a side mounted Ethernet port for internet connectivity, and USA Today is the initial content partner. This is simply because with a TV resolution, from 10 feet away, you can't get much on the screen, so a partner that used very small words was needed, and Fox said no.

The next push is to bundle TVs with home theater systems, something that tends to be done in stores already, so Samsung is putting out a pre-done bundles to capture that market. The first of these is the HT-X715, a 5.1 speaker set that has Bluetooth, a 5.8GHz wireless sub and knows how to handle HDMI. It is also in the same ToC finish and colors as the new TVs.

There were a few other interesting things shown off as well, the NV24 camera with a 10MP resolution and a 24mm wide angle zoom lens. It has HDMI outs and works with the new TV remotes, so it is inching toward connectivity, but the creativity part is still up to you.

The HMX20 is another neat one, 1080p video with a n 8MP still camera. It would be the one to use for your main camera, but it is a little large for pocket carrying. It also does HDMI and is compatible with the rest of the Samsung family.

Last they had several new MP3 players, some with touch screens, others lower end. The point to note is that all have Bluetooth connectivity and are being pulled in to the Samsung walled garden of connectivity. This is branded 'MP Freedom', and if that isn't ironic, I don't know what is.

In the end, there wasn't anything earth shattering. New products, better, smaller, faster, bigger and the like. The standout part was the new look, and it will be everywhere soon enough. More importantly, it will be copied by everyone soon after that, at which point you know they did it right. µ