The Samsung Home Hub looks like your run-of-the-mill tablet, but it serves as the central controller to your SmartThings smart home. Image: Samsung.
Samsung is continuing its quest to make its SmartThings platform your smart home app of choice, overhauling the interface, making the platform more friendly to tinkerers, and even bundling it with the company’s line of fancy Bespoke kitchen appliances.
Now the company is making a standalone screen for controlling the smart home. Called the Home Hub, it’s a a docked tablet—think of the universal remote control from back in the satellite TV days. (Which, uh, wasn’t that long ago.)
You can use the Home Hub to turn off your Samsung TV, check on your appliances’ status, and monitor their energy use. The Home Hub will offer
the same functions as the SmartThings app on your smartphone and work with other Samsung services, like SmartThings Cooking and Samsung’s Clothing Care system.
To put it more simply: if you’re planning on going all-in with Samsung in your home, the Home Hub will unite it all. The tablet is debuting in Korea first, but of course you can always use.
the app on your phone and there’s still the third-party SmartThings hub from Aeotec that you can buy now to help you get things synced up. Samsung’s Home Hub is meant to be a supplemental smart home device rather than a replacement for existing devices.
The Home Hub will be compatible with not-yet-released Matter standard. Samsung has publicly committed to supporting Matter once devices become available in 2022.
