CES 2017 (general discussion thread)

The hairbrush thing seems like it should come with a prescription from a psychiatrist. That one is just really weird. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Well, guess I was right. Nothing from Samsung on anything related to ST. I heard from a friend at CES that Samsung isn’t even showing the st TV app on the TVs. Last year, it was center stage. That is very telling.

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Im sure this doesnt surprise anyone . . . Im starting to question if ST will even have a place in this quickly growing market in the next year, everyones making leaps and bounds and ST cant even master the basics to keep up…

Samung has obviously got over the buzz of spending 200m on a product that cant keep up to the markets pace, so it will now all be shoved on the back burner whilst they focus elsewhere.

i mean think about it.

1.) When was the last time the whole ST team got stuck in to the community and contributed and kept spirits high, the last person i remember doing this was Mager & April.

2.) When was the last exciting integration announcement or feature announcement or true stability and system announcement that really got everyone hyped up and back interested.

3.) The real core developers here have either left to find greener grass and been successful or have made themselves up to be a team of un-paid ST workers to fix all their issues with 3rd party smartapp solutions that are more powerful than ST’s own creations and lack the backing and access to resources ST have.

this community used to be a buzz with excitement every night . . . now its like draining blood from a stone to get excited about this system we have all so heavily invested in.

anywaysssssssssss ----- back to CES

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Not a bit surprising. Can’t sell the same story twice. I think it’s toast.

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I think I’ll link this thread here.

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Yea I agree but the third party integrations like Ask Alexa, EchoSistent and CoRE make ST really powerful. I’m doing great things with this that I could never do with Vera.

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I agree - but to put it basic "ST would literally be NOTHING without its community developers who actual solve problems / create mass solutions and work together . . . " so im always more excited to see what you guys are doing than actual ST who tend to announce one thing whilst breaking three and then it never seems to arrive anyway . . .

If samsung turned round at CES and said we are stopping production of phones and tvs to focus on ST id still have doubts due to past promises been broken EVERY SINGLE TIME haha

Call me skeptical but im on the edge of forgetting it like most, most exciting thing about ces is working out how well everyone else is doing to spot an ideal new direction to go in haha

Looks like ST will be at CES after all. At least @alex is anyway.

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Ring introduces another outdoor security camera, this time with lights and a siren.

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CES 2017 is supposedly all about smart homes and smart cars, but SmartThings is hardly even mentioned. Silence. The only reference I could find is this:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10996/samsung-ces-2017-event-live-blog#post0104170951

What’s odd is that when talking about Samsung smart appliances, SmartThings is completely ignored. It looks to me that Samsung appliances division pushes it’s own IoT platform and mobile app, independent from SmartThings, and has no desire to integrate. Not a good sign for SmartThings.

Same goes for the " Family Hub" fridge with huge LCD screen. You’d think it’s the most natural place to control your smart home, but no, no mention of SmartThings either.

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To give some perspective here, Lowe’s which had a large presence last year with a large mocked-up house showing Iris SmartHome technology in every room, is not even attending this year. The parallel here is that both companies showed a lot, made many promises, and delivered nothing. Seems like there is plenty of egg to go around this year.

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But how is this different than Google which has Android, Chrome OS, Google Assistant, Ok, Google. They have historically not had their main OS power all devices. In fact Chrome OS as competing in some ways to Android.

In terms of IOT devices two thoughts

  1. Most of the companies that were going to disrupt the industry haven’t done much or don’t exist or are failing: Iris, Vera, Revolv, Wink. Wink is the perfect example, they bricked all devices a few years ago and now are trying to built off of devices instead of their shoddy platform.

Vera has a great dev community that made the actual platform extend but the underlining UI was horrible and buggy. Without the devs that product would have been dead years ago. You don’t really hear about them unless you have a Vera and in the forums.

  1. It’s all about the AI and Voice assistants now. So the shift is from having a hub (HomeKit model) to having the brains built into devices.

I agree that it would feel better to hear powered by Smartthings but I can only be happy that this little Hub via the community can do so much.

What else can be done that the community isn’t already doing? The app is good and easy to use (compare this to Vera!), the community is killing it and I do get excited when I see Release in the title.

Truth is, Samsung likely isn’t making money off ST and they like to try to do things themselves versus platforms that work (Android/Tizen).

https://twitter.com/ahawkinson/status/816721448572071936

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Finally! It’s official, there will be a hub to bridge integration for smartthings/Lutron, probably similar to the SmartThings/Hue integration.

From CNET

You won’t, however, be able to use the SmartThings Hub to replace your Lutron Bridge the way you can with the Wink Hub. SmartThings doesn’t include native support for the proprietary Clear Connect signal that Lutron devices use to transmit data, so you’ll still need that Lutron Bridge plugged into your router to act as translator.

This is excellent news, not just because Lutron makes great switches, but because they make one of the only switches that doesn’t require a neutral wire but still works with LEDs, so it can be used to easily retrofit older houses. :sunglasses:

“Early this year”

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Not many Z wave announcements coming out of CES, but GE/Jasco had one:

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So what isn’t clear is if this will require a new hub or not for lutron support. Given the vagueness, my guess is not given the lack of native support like wink has.

Launching early this year really means, well when its ready. So if it even shows up by end of year, I’ll be impressed.

St, so far behind and falling even further behind. The biggest show of the year and they have nothing, in fact less than nothing to show.

I am so at the point where unless I can buy it now, and it actually works as described I don’t believe any hype coming from ST.

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One interesting category at CES: HomeKit retrofits based on adding a new bridge. Or swapping out an existing radio module.

Yale announced a HomeKit module which can replace the existing Z wave or zigbee module in their real living locks. Expected to sell for $75, it’s a very easy retrofit, that means you don’t have to get a new lock and you don’t even have to remove the lock from the door. It does mean giving up Zwave compatibility to get homekit, so will be interesting to see how it sells.

And Chamberlain announced A MyQ add on which will give full HomeKit capability to existing myQ installations. That one’s not due until summer 2017, so you never know when it will actually arrive, but it’s an interesting approach. It’s also possible with that one that you would retain other existing means of control.

Honeywell announced a Lyric security system with HomeKit (that the contract based system with professional installation) but I can’t tell yet whether that’s a retrofit module or whole new set of equipment. The 2016 version of the same system has a slot where an additional radio could be added, I just don’t know if that’s how the Homekit integration is being done or not.

This is new:

So if you were waiting on a v2 hub, or TV integration, you could get this instead.

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Everything points to SmartThings falling out of favor with Samsung. Notice that all recently announced integrations are with third-party devices and services. No new integrations with Samsung-branded devices. Even those that were announced last year are all but scrapped. I won’t be surprised if Samsung will be looking to spin off SmartThings or offload it to the highest bidder in the near future.

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