While ‘the Internet of Things’ might make you cringe, and it’s admittedly a pretty poor term, there is some value to be had in connecting all of your stuff together, especially when it comes to home appliances. LG has been drilling this home for the past couple of years now and their own Smart Home initiative is to get shown off during this year’s IFA once again. Some of this stuff we saw shown off during CES 2014 back in January, but there are some new additions to the whole thing, and it sounds like LG have cleared up their message when it comes to smart things.
The Korean giant is to showcase their Smart Home during IFA this week in Berlin, and they’ll be focusing on three different themes which, as you might have guessed, have silly names. There’s Supreme Trust that deals with home monitoring that keeps an eye on what’s important to you as well as monitoring how much energy you’re using and such. Moving on to entertainment and there’s the Thrilling Burst theme, which connects your wireless HiFi and LG’s Smart TVs running WebOS together to make finding something to listen to or watch that much easier. Rounding the themes out is Eminent Conversation, which relies on LG’s HomeChat software we’ve seen before to give users one-touch commands like telling a vacuum cleaner to do its rounds or that you’re leaving home or coming home.
While this all sounds a little over-the-top, LG has some genuine products with pretty useful features to show off, like a smart refrigerator that tells you just what you have in your fridge and its calorific intake and whether you need to get more milk or whatever. There’s also a smart oven as well as a smart washing machine that you can communicate using LG’s HomeChat to make sure washing loads are done when it’s most convenient to you and such. The most interesing product though, has to be the LG Smart HOM-BOT SQUARE which is a Roomba type mini robot vacuum cleaner, but it has a display on it for info and even has cameras on its shell to monitor your surroundings and send you pictures to your smartphone, and you can even control where your little friend cleans up from your smartphone.
Overall, it’s nice to see LG tuning their appliances smart, but it’s going to take more than a few good products and some fancy themes to turn people on to the idea of having their entire home connected together. Still, that robot vacuum cleaner does sound pretty cool.