Tonight, Samsung had a few announcements for us. Just a little while ago we talked about the Galaxy Note 8.0, where phone meets tablet. Now we’re seeing the HomeSync Media streamer, which is something that’s a bit new for the Korean manufacturer. It’s basically a media streamer that hooks up to your TV and lets users stream photos, videos, and apps from their Galaxy phones and tablets at 1080p resolution. But there’s also 1TB of storage on board that you can use to store content. Furthermore the HomeSync can also support 8 different accounts for different family members. These accounts can also be encrypted so others can’t access your account. The device is coming in April, but so far there’s no pricing information available. I’d expect to see more on it next month or in April.
The HomeSync has some nice specs as well. Including…
- 1.7GHz Dual-Core (assuming Exynos powered)
- 1GB RAM, 8GB eMMC
- 1TB HDD storage
- Gigabit Ethernet
- WiFi: 802.11 b/g/n 2.4GHz & a/n 5GHz
- Bluetooth 4.0
- 2 USB 3.0 ports
- HDMI Out port
- Audio amp connection
It also plays many different video and audio types, including H.264, H.263, MPEG4, VC-1, Sorenson Spark, WMV7/8, MP43, VP8, DivX. As far as Audio, it can play these file types MP3, AAC, Lc/AAC+/eAAC+, WMA, Wav, Mid, and AC-3.
So as you can see it can play just about any video or audio file you have. You can also connect it straight to any existing TV making it very usable for just about anyone. It’s also running on Android 4.1 – Jelly Bean, so you’ve got the Jelly Bean media player to watch all your videos on.
It seems like this year, both at CES and now Mobile World Congress, many OEMs are pushing to the living room. So could this mean we might see a big Google TV refresh and push at Google I/O in May? I certainly hope so, at CES we saw the Netgear NeoTV Prime Video Box which also uses Google TV. How many of you are excited about the HomeSync media streamer from Samsung? I’m pretty excited to see what pricing is for this device. Hopefully they’ll hit the $100-150 price point with it.