Samsung’s new Home Hub is a tablet for controlling your smart home

Samsung’s latest entrant into its smart home lineup is called the Samsung Home Hub. It’s designed to provide “a customized, connected home experience to meet the needs of the entire family.”

Essentially, it’s a tablet with a docking station and it’s designed to work a bit like the universal remotes of yore. This time, rather than controlling your fancy AV system, the device will be able to control everything in the Samsung SmartThings ecosystem.

The SmartThings ecosystem is expansive, covering everything from lightbulbs to fridges and washing machines. It also has support for Matter, the upcoming protocol that aims to unify the smart home experience, so interoperability shouldn’t cause much trouble in the future.

The dock features additional high-performance microphones to enable voice commands to be picked up from the broader room while the tablet is docked.

Amazon and Google both have their own hubs in the form of the Echo Show and Nest Hub, these devices are designed to sit in one spot and need to be plugged into the wall. The new Samsung Home Hub can be popped off of its charging dock and used anywhere in the house.

How useful this will be, remains to be seen, especially since you could just install the SmartThings app on your existing phone or tablet – but it sets the device apart nonetheless.

The Home Hub is set to launch in Korea in March, with a global launch afterwards, pricing is yet to be announced.

Being a Samsung product, we don’t doubt that the hardware will be top-notch. We just hope it doesn’t force you to use Bixby.