smart tv

The Hisense update went out today and it covers the UX, UR9, UR8 and the U7 - U7 Pro if you are in Europe - running either Google TV or VIDAA. North America, Europe and APAC all at once, over the air. Hisense beat TCL to it, and TCL plus European Philips are supposed to follow later this year...

Engadget ran a reminder piece on this and it is worth repeating here because it catches people every single year. New televisions frequently ship with store or demo mode already enabled, including sets bought online that never sat on a shelf under a single fluorescent tube. The mode cranks the...

A date has landed for Gears of War: E-Day, October 6, and every time a big console exclusive gets a hard date the same threads start up about whether the TV needs replacing first. I have been through this cycle enough times to have a view on it. The features that actually change how a game like...

FlatpanelsHD has updated its QMS support list again and the only note is that more brands now support it. Nobody is shouting about this, manufacturers included, which is a shame, because QMS is one of the few HDMI 2.1 features that changes something you run into every single evening. Quick...

LG has put out a release saying LG Channels is past 5,000 channels globally and into a 37th country after the Poland rollout. Two of the ones that pushed it over the line in the US are called All Chewed Up and World Pup, which tells you roughly what the 5,000th channel looks like. Channel count...

The detail that got me in the Mnemonic write-up isn't that Samsung TV apps were reselling residential bandwidth. It's which app. A Pac-Man game that Samsung itself had put in the Editor's Choice row. Not something sideloaded, not a sketchy IPTV player you had to go hunting for. The store's own...

Magnat's Monitor Reference 5A is a pair of powered stereo floorstanders with HDMI ARC on board, pitched at GBP 759, and the review frames it as the question I keep coming back to: why is a soundbar the default answer for TV audio when a pair of active speakers costs about the same and actually...

July 24 marked thirteen years since the original Chromecast landed, which sent me rummaging for mine. Thirty five dollars, a stick about the size of a USB drive, micro-USB for power, 1080p ceiling, and no remote at all - your phone was the remote. That last part was the actual idea, and it is...

KrebsOnSecurity ran a piece this week that I have not stopped thinking about. Security firm Spur went through the LG webOS app store and found that more than 42 percent of the apps there ship with an SDK that quietly turns the TV into a residential proxy node. Not obscure sideloaded junk either...

The other half of Google's CES pitch for Google TV is generative work running on the television itself. Gemini searching your Google Photos library for a specific person or moment, Photos Remix applying artistic styles to your pictures, memories turned into what Google calls cinematic immersive...

Buried in Google's CES announcement is the thing I actually want to argue about. You'll be able to tell Gemini that the screen is too dim, or that the dialogue is lost, and it will adjust picture and sound for you without opening a settings menu. Those two phrases are Google's own examples...

Google is bolting sports briefs onto Gemini on Google TV. The pitch is narrated catch-up on whatever league you follow, starting with the NBA, NCAA basketball, NHL, MLB, MLS and NWSL, sitting in the Gemini tab on the home screen. It builds on the news briefs they added last year, and it landed...

What Hi-Fi put together a portable viewing list for summer, and the two setups worth arguing about are an iPhone 17 with AirPods Max 2, and a Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra with Buds 4 Pro. Sensible picks in isolation. As an outdoor answer they hit the same wall everything portable hits. The brightness...

Alastair Stevenson at What Hi-Fi has written up the thing I have been muttering about for years: people have got better at choosing a TV and are still terrible at putting it somewhere sensible. His specific complaint is the set parked directly beside a window, worst during summer, and I have...

Have tried a few smart home dashboards and the one that stuck is the least ambitious: the home panel on Google TV. It sits on the TV, shows the compatible lights, thermostats and cameras, and that is roughly it. The reason it wins is location. A dashboard on a phone means finding the phone...

Went digging after seeing a piece on where the default Google TV ambient photos come from, and the answer is funnier than I expected: most of them are shot by Google employees. The team leaned on a stock image marketplace early on, then from 2020 started asking Googlers to submit their own work...

Setting up a new TV is the worst half hour of owning one, so I paid this more attention than it probably deserves. Google reworked the Google TV out of box flow and handed it to Hisense first, on the 2025 U7 and U8 series, before pushing it to other Google TV devices and some of Walmart's onn...

Google pushed three more Gemini things onto Google TV and I have been going back and forth on whether any of it belongs on a television. The rollout is US and Canada first, with wider device support plus Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain listed for this spring, so plenty of you will be...

First allocations of Samsung's 2026 flagship S95H are reaching dealers, and the headline items are a third generation QD-OLED panel and the new NQ4 AI Gen3 processor. That is about as much hard detail as anyone outside Samsung has right now, so I am going to hold off on the superlatives until...

Dreame, best known for its smart home and cleaning appliances, is preparing to unveil its first high-end television at the upcoming IFA 2025 trade show in Berlin this September. Advanced Display Technology The company’s debut TV will feature a custom “Black Crystal Display” paired with a...