After smartphone – your home to be a Samsung Smarthome

Samsung is hell bent on making your home smart and says it will be able to equip its entire home appliances range with smart home technology by 2020.

Currently only a select devices produced by the South Korean firm as part of the smart home initiative is smart home compatible and it is working on introducing a broad range of its home appliances talk to each other and connect to the internet in the near future.

"UAE will be one of the first few countries in the world that could incorporate smart home technology at an early stage. Currently we are at a very nascent stage, simply because there are not many compatible products in the market," said Vinod Nair, head of Consumer Electronics at Samsung Gulf Electronics.

Most of its Internet of Things (IoT) products available in the market today is limited to the switching on and switching off the lights, and controlling and monitoring homes thanks to a range of access control devices and compatible security cameras.

At the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) showed off the Hub based on its SmartThings platform including its smart refrigerator.

Samsung acquired the smart home startup SmartThings in 2014 and incorporated it as part of its Open Innovation Centre. Samsung has been working in parallel with Google and Apple towards developing its own SmartHome technology based on the Tizen OS. However the company is also reportedly working on developing an OS for IoT. The forthcoming 2016 Samsung Developer Conference (SDC) on April 27 and 28 at San Francisco could reveal more details about the roadmap ahead in terms of the new OS.

"We have lots of interesting demos in the works for SDC and exciting announcements for the future of IoT," says Curtis Sasaki, VP of Ecosystems and IoT General Manager at Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center (SSIC).

"There will be discussions and sessions on interoperability between devices and applications, security, home gateways, introductory and advanced sessions with the SmartThings ecosystem, and more," he adds in his blog post.

Meanwhile Samsung's new smart fridge which it announced at the CES will retail in the UAE starting early 2017. "The product will roll out into the North American market during the second half of 2016. We will be able to bring the device into the UAE by 2017, sometime during the first quarter," says Nair.

The smart fridge is smart enough to even order groceries directly from partner stores.

A shopping app created by MasterCard lets users buy groceries right from the door of the refrdgerator.  MasterCard is currently tying up with various retail such as FreshDirect and ShopRite, and says more stores will be added in future. We could just well see a similar tie ups before the product is launched here in the UAE.

Samsung also last week launched its Twin Cooling Plus refrigerator line up in the UAE and says it is the first of its kind machine in the category.

The two main advantages is that the food remains fresh for extra long hours, thereby extending the expiry date of the product stored and also aimed specifically at the expat population that travel out for month long vacations every year.

“The new Twin Cooling Plus TMF refrigerators are a milestone for customizable premium home appliances. We listened carefully to our consumers when they said that they want to be able to keep their fruit and vegetables fresher for longer” said Nair.

"Users will also be able to simply switch of the freezer or convert it into a refrigerator or do vice versa when they plan to go on leave," he added.

"We specifically introduced these new features following extensive research in the local market ," he added.

The Home appliances segment in the Gulf has been experiencing a a stable and steady growth. "During the first quarter itself we registered a 23 per cent growth across the lower Gulf, and most of it came from the UAE," he said.

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.