A few years back, Samsung bought up a home entertainment equipment company called Boxee. Ultimately, nothing much came of their joint effort, though it did come to light that they had some serious plans for users’ living rooms. Samsung and Boxee were planning on creating a product that would be the one stop shop for living room and home entertainment control, hooking into everything from your TV to your home sound system, all controlled through a suite of custom-built apps. The device that all of these would run on never came to light back then, but the quirky tablet has finally surfaced and gives a pretty good glimpse at how it would have all worked.
While Samsung and Boxee’s plans ultimately never made it to market, with Samsung getting rid of or reassigning the entire team behind Boxee for whatever reason, they did manage to produce a prototype tablet together. This tablet would have acted as the central hub for all of a user’s home entertainment, and a prototype in a nearly-finished state ended up in the wild. The leak is reportedly the first time Samsung and Boxee’s efforts have ever been seen by the public. Called the “Perfect Experience”, the 8 inch tablet in the photos below boasted a special software suite made to connect it to home entertainment devices and not only control them, but act as a hub for them and allow the user to view content on the tablet itself as well. The tablet bears many of the standard trappings adorning its somewhat quirky design; a 3.5mm headphone jack, an IR blaster for use as a remote, a MicroUSB charging port and magnetic pins, a speaker, a power button that seems to turn on the host TV and the tablet, along with volume buttons, and a physical home key on the front.
When an attempt was made to connect the tablet to a few devices, it ultimately got nowhere. It isn’t clear what version of Android the tablet was running, but the power menu looked to be the old version used in Android 4.4 KitKat and some early 5.0 Lollipop builds, and the boot screen reportedly matches up to older Samsung devices from that era, although no pictures were shown of the bootup process. The tablet supposedly would have been a box-in with certain Samsung television sets, had it come full circle.
