GTrusted

Samsung Smart LED TV’s Tizen- A Smooth Blend

Samsung was one of early TV makers aggressively pushing Smart TV's in the US, capitalizing on its success in taking market share away from its Japanese competition during the industry's transition to flat panel TV's.  Samsung has a strong market share in most markets outside of Japan, so it's no surprise they decided to go down a different path when implementing Smart TV's, eschewing adopting any US based software options from Google Android TV, Yahoo Smart TV, or Mozilla Firefox .

Even though Tizen is open source available to everyone, Samsung has been the most visible adopter of this operating system in its wearable, smartphone, camera, and TV products.  One of the reasons for this is that the predecessor of Tizen had been a version of Linux developed by Samsung.

I purchased a Samsung Smart LED TV 5500 43" TV at a large Tsannkuen 3C electronics store in the Neihu section of Taipei, Taiwan.  With Tsannkuen's brightly colored yellow stores, they are conveniently located all around the country.

In Taiwan, they will open the TV in front of you to make sure everything works before you take it home.  They do this because the return policy is not very liberal so you need to make sure you don't buy a lemon.

Here's what else you can find inside the Samsung SmartTV 5500 box other than the screen itself- mainly the remote control, batteries, power cable, and TV stand.

To highlight how important the Internet is now to Smart TV's the first setup screen that you see when you turn on the TV is the network setup screen.

Because this Samsung TV was purchased in Taiwan, it's startup menu's are all in Chinese and unfortunately the TV is not intelligent enough to allow you change the  language in the beginning.   Here are the initial setup screens that you have to go through to start using the Samsung SmartTV.

Choose your WiFi Network:

Enter your SSID password:

The network is setup:

Samsung license agreement: 

TV setup: (oh yeah, this is actually a TV)

Setup is complete:

You can change to English by pressing multi-colored cube shaped menu button in the middle of the remote control.

Samsung has several apps including YouTube that you can use to stream video directly to your TV.

Samsung's Smart LED TV is one of the easiest Smart TV's out there to setup and use.  You don't feel like an operating system has been thrown into the TV making it difficult to use- rather the TV stays a TV and the operating system is a supporting actor in the background.

In some countries like India, Tizen is prominently promoted as a key feature.

But in other countries like the US, in places like Best Buy you'd be hard pressed to learn that your Samsung Smart LED TV is actually running Tizen.

Samsung has also been aggressive in not only integrating Smart TV functionality, but the entire set top box into the TV.  Click here to see what Samsung has done with DirectTV in the US to make it easier to pump 4K content directly into your Samsung Smart LED TV.