"Ladies and gentlemen," warns a voice-over, "the show is going to start in two minutes: turn off your phones." Normal if it weren't the Samsung show, the world's largest seller of smartphones. By then, Samsung had beaten everyone in the unofficial CES queuing championship. The world number 1 in TVs, the world number 1 in smartphones, the American number 1 in refrigerators, apparently, deserved it. Then he was reeling off wonders like someone who has a catalogue, without any sense of Hollywood spectacle. With a quarter of that, Microsoft sets up a nativity scene with water mills. But they are South Koreans, after all.
The Samsung show has left some gems, such as the presentation of the 7,7-inch tablet and the 5,3-inch Note Smartphone. Yes, indeed, we no longer know what what is, so that the trend of phones like the Note are known as tabletphones. Assimilate the concept. Note is ready for 4G and with it the pointer reappears, with 256 sensitivities to differentiate the different touches on the screen. The software instantly recognizes notes that are written manually.
But the bulk of his exposure was taken by television. For six years, Samsung has been the undisputed leader in the world market. Practically since the arrival of flat screens. In the packed hall of the Venetian hotel, he presented his line of models up to 75 inches, super slim, of course 3D and of course with Internet; but as Sony would do hours later or LG had done before, the common denominator of all is the connectivity of all devices through the Internet.
With the Internet also comes a new lexicography. There is no talk about the quality of the contrast of the image or the design, now the important thing about the television is the type of processor it has inside, so goodbye to the stupid box. In the case of Samsung TVs, the processor is a dual core from Intel. Another old word is the concept of "channels." They are now called "contents". These televisions connect to YouTube, Skype, Facebook or Netflix. More than what one incorporates, because the devices are designed to receive family photos sent from the other end of the world through a cell phone or a camera. That is interconnectivity, and this concept seems as attractive or more than that of 3D, it is not for nothing that Google and Apple bet on their channels and content producers negotiate with them - such as Roxio, the creators of the angry birds - so that their games to be viewed on Samsung televisions.
The new ES 8000 television model also relegates the remote control. There will not be so many family disputes, there will be more, because the broadcasts are changed with the voice, so we now watch the family to see who shouts the most. Another of his abilities is the recognition of people's movements, a kind of Kinect, which for the moment will be used to exercise in front of the TV and count the calories burned.
The television of the future is also full of applications. Twenty million have already been downloaded, 60% this year. In just a couple of years we have gone from 500 specific applications for televisions to more than 25.000 today. The television is, will be, simply the largest screen in the house where you can see, listen, and play with content previously designed for other devices. Televisions are becoming "simpler, smarter and more entertaining," as summarized by Boon Keun Yoon, president of Samsung's entertainment division.