As an introductory product, TCL will be launching its line with a 4K Google TV, the P725, which comes baked with voice activation alongside the budget friendly P615 4K HDR Android TV, and that will be followed up by the C725 4K QLED Google TV with quantum dot display technology later in November.

TCL is a company that’s been aboard the Roku TV train since the very start and it will be interesting to see whether any of those features will be launching in Mzansi soon.

“South Africa has always been on our radar as a next expansion point, and we’re thrilled to officially be in the market. We will be utilising South African resources as much as possible on the ground and that includes a local South African assembly partner with plans for expansion in the near future,” says Robin YI, General Manager of TCL South Africa.

Priced from R65 000, the QLED TVs use Samsung’s Quantum dot display technology for 100-percent colour volume along with broader viewing angles than before. A new sound bar and Blu-ray player complete the 2017 line-up. Pricing for the 2017 QLED TVs was confirmed in February, and as we expected the cutting-edge doesn’t come cheap.

Buy direct from Samsung and the 65-inch QN65Q7F flatscreen comes in at R65 000 or R140 000 for the 75-inch, and R400 000 for the 88-inch. It’s worth noting that street price through Dion Wired, Makro and others can be somewhat cheaper.

All of the new models get Samsung’s new software and remote, dubbed Q Smart. The Smart Hub has new streaming options, including Samsung’s own TV Plus service for 4K content, and a music tile with various streaming audio partners. Voice control through the Samsung One Remote Control has been expanded to cover more services and features.

Meanwhile, with a no-gap mount the TVs look all the more like they’ve been painted onto your living room wall. A single cable – dubbed the “Invisible Connection” – links the display to a control box, thin enough courtesy of optical technology to paint over. If you’d rather, a Studio Stand props the QLED sets up like an easel, while the Gravity Stand has power-rotate for serving different viewing angles.

Samsung has some new accessories to go with its QLED TVs, too. The MS750 Sound+ Soundbar promises an integrated subwoofer and 5-channel sound from a single box, and can be used either standalone or docked into the base of a compatible Samsung TV to daisy-chain off its power with no extra wires. 

It’s with The Frame that Samsung starts to get a little weirder. Designed in collaboration with Yves Behar, it’s billed as “a lifestyle TV” that doubles as a digital painting when you’re not watching Netflix. In short, it’s a QLED TV with a picture frame around it, taking advantage of the no-gap wall mounting and super-discreet cabling to add to the illusion that it’s a painting not a display.

Normally The Frame works just as the rest of Samsung’s TV line-up does, the difference showing up when it’s turned off. Rather than just going into standby, it automatically switches into “Art Mode”. Samsung includes over 100 different pieces of artwork, organized into ten categories like landscape, architecture, wildlife, action, and drawing.

Samsung will offer a number of different colours, bezels, and an optional Studio Stand for The Frame. Its unclear whether the frame will be introduced locally. 

I’ve been living with the revamped set-top box for the past five weeks, to see just how much of an upgrade this is.

First Impressions

Physically, the fourth-gen Apple TV takes the squat, black box of before and leaves it out to proof. Risen loaf-like, the end result has the same squircle footprint but stands roughly twice as tall. On the back, there’s an ethernet port, HDMI output, and power connector, along with a new USB-C port that’s used for service. Sadly, gone is the optical digital audio output. 

Storage has taken a leap, too, with a choice of either 32GB or 64GB versions. It’ll be app data rather than content taking up that space, mind, since Apple still intends the set-top box to be a streaming device.

Then there’s the remote, which does away with the sliver of brushed silver aluminum of the old version and replaces it with a bigger, glass-fronted slab with an aluminum back and more controls.

As well as menu, play/pause, and volume buttons – the latter of which will control your TV, as long as it supports the HDMI-CEC standard or you teach the remote’s IR blaster the right settings – there’s now a home button and a Siri trigger. A trackpad is integrated invisibly, rather than the old remote’s D-pad, and there’s Bluetooth inside so that you don’t need to worry about line-of-sight.

Apple has dubbed it the Siri Remote, and sure enough Siri takes pride of place in navigating through the Apple TV’s interface. It also means the controller – which includes an accelerometer and gyroscope to track movement, like a Wii controller – is a little more power-hungry, so there’s now an internal battery that recharges via a Lightning port on the bottom edge. Mind you, I only noticed this when photographing the device when it was ready to leave me. Nor have I had to charge it during the 5 week period.

Alternatively, you can use the new Remote app for iOS devices that Apple offers as a free download. That has the benefit of offering an onscreen keyboard for swifter text entry, something which can streamline punching in login credentials for all your various media services.

That said, tvOS – the offshoot of iOS tailored for the fourth-gen Apple TV and for being used from across the living room – makes fewer demands for usernames and passwords, assuming you’re already set up on your iPhone and iPad (and they’re running iOS 9.1 or later).

Getting Started

Pair that device with your new Apple TV over Bluetooth – which you can do by simply putting the iPhone nearby – and the set-top box can extract your WiFi and iTunes account settings. Unfortunately, from that point on you’re on your own: even if you have the Netflix, Hulu, or other accounts set up in their respective apps on your phone, the Apple TV can’t grab those details.

Instead you’re left with the onscreen keyboard, which is now a long strip of letters rather than a grid. Frankly neither the old nor the new layouts are especially swift to use (I don’t have a touch enabled TV), though tvOS does have a new “Recent” option which shows the last few email addresses and account names you entered. Assuming your various on-demand services all use the same username, you might only have to plug in the password each time.

When you’re finally set up, then it’s Siri’s turn. Rumors of a voice-led interface for an Apple TV set began years ago, but Amazon beat Apple to the market with the Fire TV. Still, Apple claims that Siri is a little more intelligent than Amazon’s system. Still, finding Amazon’s Fire TV here will prove near impossible.

You can ask for movies or shows by name, or by theme – “kids movies” perhaps, or “action movies” – and Siri supports qualifiers too. “Kids movies from the 80s” will include both criteria, which sounds like it should be easy but requires a whole lot of metadata on the back-end. 

Beyond that, Siri has some other uses, though she falls frustratingly short of the experience on an iPhone or iPad. You can navigate playback by voice – “Skip forward ten minutes” or “Go back an hour” for instance – and ask “Who’s in this movie?” to get a rundown of the actors. “What did she say?” will automatically skip back fifteen seconds and temporarily turn on closed-captions.

More broadly, weather reports and sports results are on offer, and there’s that integration with Apple Music. You also can’t search the App Store by voice, which highlights one of the fourth-gen Apple TV’s biggest headaches: content discovery.

Apps on the Apple TV were the obvious path for the Cupertino company to take, but sifting through them can be laborious. The most obvious solution would be the ability to browse the store on an iPad or iPhone and then remotely install apps to your Apple TV, but that’s not currently supported.

Apple hides some of tvOS’ niceties from first glance. Double-tapping the Home button summons an app switcher, just as it does on an iPhone, which avoids the need to jump back to the home screen. You can adjust the Siri Remote’s trackpad sensitivity, too, which I’d recommend as it can be a little frenetic at its default, or mimic a D-pad by tapping the four edges to navigate a step at a time.

For audio, there’s 5.1 surround sound if you have the right speaker system, or you can pair Bluetooth headphones; I’ve made frequent use of the latter during late-night Netflix binges. If there are a few of you watching, but you still don’t want to wake up the rest of the house, the “Reduce Loud Sounds” option irons out the more bombastic audio while still ensuring speech can be heard.

In Closing

A lot of the potential is still to come, however. We’ve had a taste of how Siri can improve content discovery, and how tvOS can further blur the lines between phone, tablet, and TV, but while this might be Apple’s fourth generation of box, it’s only the first generation of those features and in many ways they’re untested, lacking in abilities, or both.

The Apple TV is still the best way to consume iTunes content in your living room, and one of the better ways to deliver streaming media from third-party services like Netflix, Hulu and ShowMax to your TV. Whether the remainder of the bets Apple has made on its new box pay off, we won’t know until this glorious console becomes a resident in our living room.

That hasn’t stopped the brand from reaching to newer heights though, as they gear up for the launch of their new generation ULED TV’s taking place in Johannesburg tomorrow. Given the lure and walk-through we got at IFA Berlin, we’ve got quite an idea of the TV sets we can expect from Hisense. Their invitation gives quite an emphasis on the word ‘U’.

4K ULED M7000 

The company introduced this 4K-ready TV to the US and UK markets roughtly 2 months ago. A dim factsheet details that the TV is actually an LED TV with some built-in improvements to allow for local dimming.

That means the set’s backlight has been designed to respond to the image on-screen, and dim when needed to offer better contrast in low-light scenes, and more vibrant whites in others.

Elsewhere, there’s a quad-core processor powering the TV, plus built-in Wi-Fi, along with a load of smart features and apps including iPlayer and Netflix.

Amazon Prime Video is also pre-installed, and seeing as both Netflix and Amazon now allow you to stream 4K content, it’s software worth having.

K760 SERIES 55″ Curved Smart ULED TV

Be prepared to imagine a new era of television with the Hisense Smart TV. That all is according to Hisense’s global website. The set features a Smart TV with Built-in WIFI, 4 HDMI Allows Multiple HD Connection, D-LED Technology, High Contrast Ratio for “Blacker” Blacks & Brighter Colours and Crisp 3840 x 2160 resolution.

The rest is pretty much a mystery though follow me for live tweets and up-to-the-minute updates on their U TV launch event. 

From the 12^th May* every Samsung SMART TV purchased through participating retailers, will come with 1 million free MBs of data from Vox Telecom, which is valid for a year and is unthrottled, unshaped, premium grade ADSL. The free data is equivalent to being able to stream up to 60 000 videos and watch up to 1 000 movies as well as connect via social media, email, chat and surf the internet. With 1 million MBs, users will be able to discover a whole new world on their Smart TVs. Given that you have a BoxOffice account or a reliable Netflix bypass of course.

If you’re still stuck on tonight Ted – that super annoying, funny, stupid, drunkard of a teddy bear you wish you had –  will be screening right after Carte Blanche at 20h05 shortly followed by Brodie in Homeland.

The display is said to be built from plastic substrates that give it bendable properties, allowing it to be fixed inside devices with curved (but likely rigid) designs.

Reports  as found on Engadget suggest LG could include its first flexible screen inside the G Flex, a new 6-inch smartphone set to be announced next month, but the company points to new products with “enhanced performance and differentiated designs” coming next year. Something tells us LG may move quickly to announce its first such product, with Samsung strongly tipped to unveil its own exotically-shaped smartphone next month. It’s probable that both devices will be artistically bent to achieve their form, so we’ll probably have to wait a little longer for something that actually bends into our jean pockets.