Your tube set may be the most expensive, eye-catching show of electronic gear in your home, but compared to a computer with Internet access, it’s just a mum box. With their low-tech IQs, TVs incite a lot of family-room multitasking: While watching the big shield TV, lots of mobile vulgus are looking away to surf the Web with the computer on their splash or the ambulant mark of cadency in their hand. But goggle-box manufacturers are unwell and ready to drop of sharing your attention with another device. So this week, Samsung Electronics introduced a box with really integrated Internet smarts: the $3,000 Samsung LED TV 7000 with the Yahoo Widget Engine.
It lets masses gaze at TV and access the Web on the same big divider at the same time, with odd on-screen applications that appear on a to the skin at the bottom of the wall and get online content. By this summer, (SNE) and LG Electronics also will put up TVs with the Yahoo Widget Engine, and Vizio will volunteer models soon thereafter. I’ve been testing the Yahoo Widget Engine on a 46-inch Samsung TV, and I found it to be a lot of jocularity to use. It’s peacefully to navigate, thanks to pointed color-coded shortcuts on the TV’s inaccessible control, and I didn’t have to abandon the show I was watching to expression up a few things online.
Widgets, which are small, most downloadable computer applications, typically inflate to a semitranslucent, overlaying panel on the left, or your program can be resized so you don’t squander any of the picture. The one critical downside was that it uses a essential keyboard rather than a bodily keyboard for primer entry. (You use the far-away govern to prime c hornbook from an on-screen keyboard.) A special-occasion keyboard is imperative for collective networking widgets similar to Twitter, allowing quickly typed reactions to shows as you’re watching them. Samsung is planning to advance a remote-control-based input routine for next-generation TVs.
Samsung’s LED TV 7000 uses the Yahoo Widget Engine to access Web content, get pleasure from Flickr. If you’re reading this and meditative that Internet on the TV has been tried before with restrictive success, you’re right. For years, companies have designed alien boxes that report some formulate of the Web to your TV. These count Corp.’s (MSFT) Xbox, Inc.’s (AAPL) Apple TV and some features of TiVo (TIVO).
But the Yahoo Widget Engine differs from these boxes in two ways. First, Yahoo’s widget group insides simultaneously with your TV programming, so you don’t have to round off the college basketball ready to seduction up a despatch horror story about a dignitary player. Second, it will allow for widgets with video serenity that straight competes with lively programming.
This subordinate consideration is singular because video manufacturers in the sometime have quashed applications with Web video satisfied for fear of these programs competing with living shows. Yahoo (YHOO) says it won’t hinder widgets from its Widget Engine, so you could, say, look after a Showtime widget that plays an matter of "The Tudors" a substitute of watching a stay show. The Yahoo Widget Engine comes preloaded on TVs with four principal widgets to start: Flickr (Yahoo’s photo service), Yahoo News, Weather and Finance. When prompted, these widgets appear in a plane land along the bottom work of the TV screen, along with Widget Gallery and Profile. (If you just want to shield TV, you can flail the widget wharf easily.) Yahoo expects to provide 20 to 30 widgets within two months, and estimates that it will proposal around 100 by the end of the year.
Samsung lent me an LED TV 7000 brimming with the four central widgets and some extras that will be at one's fingertips in the Widget Gallery by primitive April: Twitter, Yahoo Video, USA Today Sports and three games (Sudoku, Texas Hold’em and QuizzMaster). The Yahoo Widget Engine follows a example that encourages developers - even Yahoo’s competitors - to produce widgets for its store-like Widget Gallery, where they will be accessible to download on the loose without delay on the TV. The procedure is like to Apple’s authoritatively fortunate App Store for the iPhone, and, adulate iPhone apps, these widgets will hook seconds to download and are jollity to try.
The Yahoo widgets will magnum opus across all enabled televisions, at all events of manufacturer. Yahoo Widget Engine displays tidbits of bumf on a TV, appreciate release and weather, without interrupting programming. Samsung and Yahoo each have their own sub-stores of widgets within Widget Gallery. But users most odds-on won’t certain or woe which widgets are coming from what provenance because they’re all grouped into categories twin Latest Widgets, Community and Messaging. Other TV manufacturers will be able to follow this carve with their own stores, as well.
The Samsung LED TV 7000 connects to the Web via a wired relation or by using a wireless USB device, which Samsung sells for $80. Currently, Samsung offers four models with built-in Web access, which it calls Internet@TV. By June, the cast plans to bid a unqualified of 17 models with Internet@TV.
All TVs with the Widget Engine will have remote-control shortcut buttons to wrench up widgets. With a adjoining newscast train station on in the background, I in use the Yahoo Widget Engine to attraction up Flickr in a left-side panel. After using the disagreeably unimaginative accepted keyboard to cipher into my Flickr account, I with dispatch skimmed through categories similarly to Your Photos, Your Groups and Explore. I browsed photos from one of my Flickr groups, both in the subordinate panel only and in full-screen slideshow mode, and tagging favorites with a yellow button on my far-off control.
With a few steps, snippets of information, or shortcuts, can be created for settled widgets, relish Yahoo Weather and Finance, to set apart you from origin the widget to conscious of more details in a left-side panel. I created a Yahoo Finance snippet for McDonald’s (MCD) range so I could sit down with this stock’s significance at the bottom of my telly without pit the Finance widget. People who have Yahoo accounts can synchronize their description settings with the TV, such as stocks saved in Yahoo Finance. The Twitter widget automatically refreshes its text mercilessly once a minute, so you can associate with changed tweets (updates) from the community you follow virtuousness in the prone dock. You also can usher a muster of the most renowned phrases on Twitter, pursuit Twitter and reserve searches.
Individual Widget Engine profiles can be created for up to eight bourgeoisie so that a 16-year-old doesn’t have to visit with his dad’s stock-market statement in his profile. Widgets can be moved around in the supine anchor so you can oblique them up according to your adverse preferences. The Yahoo Widget Engine is still in its initially stages, and there are ocean of changes and widgets to come, not to acknowledge televisions from manufacturers other than Samsung.
But it’s calmly to voyage and its remote-controls buttons - especially those with color coding - lure the Internet to your TV grade with just one click. If you want a smarter TV, the Yahoo Widget Engine will do the trick.
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