The Home Hub will have an 8.4-inch touchscreen that will sit in a charging dock. Two microphones will send your voice commands to Bixby(!), and two speakers will let you play music and more. In addition to smart home devices, the Home Hub will let you control other devices in your home such as appliances, monitor energy use and air quality, and look up recipes. Even though it no longer makes one of the best smart home hubs, Samsung’s SmartThings platform is still one of the best when it comes to connecting and controlling smart home devices. It’s easy to create pretty complex integrations between lots of different products. However, unless you want to have the SmartThings app permanently open on a tablet, you have to either connect it to Alexa or Google Assistant, or dig out your phone if you want to turn the lights on. Samsung also announced that it was joining the Home Connectivity Alliance (opens in new tab), so presumably in the future, you’d be able to use its Home Hub even if you had a GE dishwasher or a Trane air conditioner. Samsung didn’t provide a price for the Home Hub, but said it would launch in Korea in March, with global distribution to come after. Whenever it arrives in the U.S., I can’t wait to try it out.
