New year, new rant. Lately I had the “pleasure” of using a Smart TV, namely the Samsung UE46ES8000. My grandfather bought this thing and was using it for watching TV and BluRay discs. For this task, the device is pretty fine, looks nice and shiny and has surprisingly good quality when playing DVDs via his BluRay player.
Now there’s a but: it has way to many completely useless features, being a “Smart TV”. So it has its normal remote. The Samsung BluRay player has its own remote which can control the TV via HDMI CEC which works pretty well, but now you got two remotes. Next you have a fancy little remote which features a touchpad which works similar to the Macbook touchpads. I suppose it uses Bluetooth and can control other devices by a fourth device that translates this fancy-remote signal to infrared.
Needless to say, my grandfather can’t use any of these things, except for the ordinary remote, because that’s the only thing he understands. And I can only use the remote because it’s the only thing that works.
Let me add some structure to explain you, why you should not get a Smart TV but a DumbTV. I’ll explain in the end what I mean by DumbTV.
1. Input Methods suck
I tried using the touchpad remote. It looks really nice and shiny, but the first time I used it, I didn’t know how to even click. After checking the manual, turns out it works like a Macbook touchpad. Fair enough. It also features a microphone, so you can just speak your commands. Sounds awesome, right?
I respect new input methods, for example the Bluetooth PS3 remote is probably my favorite remote ever and we shouldn’t ever have to go back to anything less. But the Samsung touchpad remote is awful. It is a remote, so I fully expect it to work from a couch that is some 5 meters away from the screen. You see where this is going because it doesn’t work. The remote goes so some energy saving sleep state really fast, so unless you use it all the time, it turns off and when you turn it on, it transmits all motions at once in a burst.
You get a shitload of incorrect outputs. It’s like an application that froze and upon thawing it executes all the actions you clicked while the application was frozen.
My grandfather also likes new and shiny things so he also bought a wireless mouse and keyboard, because the “experts” who installed this TV told him it’s a good idea. Guess what, it’s not.
When you connect the keyboard, it asks you for the layout and then proceeds to tell you that “the keyboard might not work in all applications”. Where “not all” translates to “none” because I haven’t yet found an application that works correctly. Searching in the YouTube app? Well, up and down works because it is presumably mapped to the keys on the remote. Media keys? No, sir! But ok that was a bit much to expect. In the browser it works, but the mouse that works in the main menu does not work in the browser.
I kid you not.
The browser did not work with the mouse.
On a related note, the 2.4 GHz wireless mouse input is jagged and laggy. In all fairness the box says “up to 5m” and if I use the mouse directly in front of the TV it works. Just not on the couch which is 3m away.
2. The UI is awful
The TV boots into TV mode from where you have to boot into Smart TV mode. Kinda like booting Windows 3.1 by typing “win” in the prompt. Smart TV takes some 20-30 seconds to load which is two or three times as long as the TV mode, it then opens into a menu where you can start apps.
The menu is a mixture between shiny UI and icons with a area where I saw a flashing advertisement to install some app. Flashing advertisements in my TV? Please shoot me.
It looks style-wise kind of like Android with the Play Store replaced by Samsung Apps, so it is kinda like Samsungs Android TouchWiz UI without Play Store. I tried to open apps to be greeted by a message saying I need to update them first. sigh Okay. There’s no real UI for downloading, so you only see a throbber in the upper right corner saying “updating”. No indication if it is downloading, installing or even stalled. Nothing. And you can’t cancel. Only by turning off the TV. Which is what I did at least three times because updating the browser took 10 minutes.
Furthermore, everytime you move the selection, you get a selection sound. Well, if the touchpad remote gets unstuck and sends many operations at once, the selection sounds starts, then the next one starts stopping the previous one, then another starts and you get a cacophony of sounds. It’s 2013 now, I shouldn’t need to facepalm on this.
If people complain the Android UI is wonky, they clearly haven’t used Samsung SmartTV.
I’m 100% sure my mom won’t be able to use this, don’t even think about my grandpa. Hell, even I don’t really want to cope with it.
3. The connection is flaky
It is a SmartTV so it is just smart to connect to the internets. Admittedly. The hardware supports 802.11bgn, no complaints there. What it does not support is effing holding this damn connection. Every couple of boot-ups, it tells me that there is no internet connection.
My (Samsung) smartphone displays four bars out of five in the same WiFi and the connection to the internet is fine. None of the three other smartphones nor the three other laptops in the same WiFi have any kind of problems.
Well, then it says, “alright, I can connect to the router but still not to the internet”. Which is a lie. If you repeat the connection assistant for a couple of times and reboot the TV once or twice, it detects the internet connection. Magic.
What a farce.
4. The apps, oh, the apps!
One could argue the whole point of having a Smart TV is to install and use apps on the device. But for apps, you got to have an ecosystem. The Samsung SmartTV hasn’t. So the apps there have close to no quality at all.
I tested a number of apps. The app of the national television (TVP VOD) either freezes in the menu, does not display the menu contents or just starts up forever so I have to reboot the TV.
The other streaming app I tried has decent selection but it is too retarded to buffer properly, so it just buffers every 3 seconds, worse than YouTube some six years ago. Fun fact: the ads it displays don’t have any buffering issues. And after it stops playback for the 20th time, it decides to give up and show an error message. After that, it seems to buffer in the background and next time it can play the video kinda okay. I suspect this application was indeed written by monkeys punching on typewriters.
And it’s not the bandwidth. I can play YouTube in 1080p just fine, so some SD content shouldn’t be an issue. At all.
Talking about YouTube. There’s an app for that. It boots up for like 60 seconds and the keyboard does not work. So after you type in your search query using direction keys on the remote (haha) it searches fine and displays the video. With some buffering issues but at this point I am fully willing to let it slide. I’d even argue that this thing is so far the best app on the TV. Or the least bad.
And of course there is the usual crapware, with Facebook and Twitter. How many of you think my grandfather who is 80 now, will use Facebook? At least I got around to explain him what Facebook is. At least you can uninstall some of these. Not all, mind you.
5. The localization
Alright, polish is not the most common language, but the one my grandpa is most familiar with. So he set the TV’s language to polish. When he asked me to set up the TV, I was quite tempted to set it to english because the translation should be less botched. Korean should be fine as well. But the polish one is awful in a funny way.
To give you english native-speakers some insights: usually localizations are either incomplete with english paragraphs or menus mixed in or use strange words or grammer. Sometimes the special characters are wrong. This one is neither:
It shortens every word that is longer than 5 letters. Even where there would be enough room for the whole words. Sometimes it is hard to even understand what the menu item is supposed to mean. I felt like crying, navigating the menus helplessly.
DumbTV
The worst thing, I can wholly understand how this thing came to be. The idea sounds good on paper, using a TV to do tasks that are usually done using a computer. Problem: computers are better at this, because the software on computers is written by software programmers who know their stuff, not by hardware companies that invest into their own platform.
I get it why the apps are bad: because nobody bothers to write them properly. Things have to be shipped and if they are half-working that’s good enough. The UI is bad because nobody bothered to make it good. This is surprisingly similar to “smartphones” before Apple presented a device with really polished UI - the iPhone, in 2007.
So what if you’d like a Smart TV solution? Get a device from a vendor that cares about the software like the Apple TV or even Google TV.
The DumbTV thing is what I’d want to have: a TV that does one thing, and one thing well. It should display video content, like a monitor. Without any fancy bullshit. If I want to have “smart” content, I’d stream it from my PC or phone. Maybe using something like WiDi or Miracast.