Samsung Googles web TV

HEDGING ITS BETS, Samsung Electronics has signed up for the Google TV proposition and launched a Blu-ray player and companion box that supports it.

The release marks another step in the firm's Smart TV plans, and it will let people do glorious things like watch television, surf the Internet, update their social notworking pages, check email, and, oddly enough, track fantasy football scores, something that must be a pastime of someone in the Samsung PR machine.

Nothing is simple these days, so rather than just adding Google's features to a television, the Samsung Google dalliance "seamlessly integrates web content into a tradtional TV watching experience", which amounts to about the same thing in our opinion.

We cannot say what the devices are called, since in its release Samsung apparently did not think it was necessary to tell us. However, if you are interested you could have seen one at booth number 11033 at CES.

The deal also extends to the palm of your hand, as any users that adopt the offspring of the relationship will get a Google TV remote control that includes a full Qwerty keyboard, which we suspect will make it harder to lose and a lot more satisfying to throw.

The Samsung remote also includes a microphone for voice search, meaning that sofa bound TV junkies will soon rely on nothing but guttural moans to control their visual garbage pipe.

But the last time we checked, Google television was indefinitely delayed in the UK, and that was in December. It has also been rejected by a number of high profile programmers, which suggests that the market is watching all the other channels instead. µ