Two TVs in one week – Xiaomi unveiled a 55″ 4K TV for CNY 5,000 ($800/€750). That’s the biggest Xiaomi Mi TV yet, the previous models were 49″ and 40″. Interestingly, the new Mi TV comes with a 6.2 sound bar and wireless all-aluminum subwoofer included in the box.

It’s a smart TV with an upgraded chipset, MStar 6A928. Read more »

While many Android vendors have switched to Chrome and the default and only web browser out of the box on their phones, Samsung maintains the heavily-customized Internet app. Tizen Indonesia has revealed that the app will be rebranded Samsung Browser and will be available on all Samsung platforms.

This covers everything from phones and tablets (Android and Tizen) to TVs. Read more »

Xiaomi has announced a new 40-inch model as part of its Mi TV 2 line-up. As the younger kin of the 49-inch Mi TV 2 with 4K video support, the new 40-inch Mi TV 2 model is more of an affordable full HD version. Xiaomi’s new 40-inch Mi TV 2 will be available on March 31 from Xiaomi website.

The new Mi TV 2 model features a 40-inch SHARP SDP X-GEN display panel with full HD pixel resolution and LED backlight mode with 5000:1 contrast ratio. Read more »

As most of you surely remember, last week Apple held its “Spring Forward”, which was buzzing with announcements. But amidst all the hype about the Apple Watch, which was undoubtedly the star of the show, a lot of you might have missed the news about the Apple TV, or at least not given it too much thought.

What Apple did was slash the price of the TV box from $99 to $69 and introduce the new HBO Now streaming service. A lot of people have speculated that this might be a precursor to an impending new Apple TV announcement and today a new rumor fuels speculations even further. Information slipped through the cracks that a new Apple TV is incoming and it will share the hardware platform of the iPhone 6. Read more »

Xiaomi has officially announced its plans to reveal two new Mi TV models on March 24. The Chinese company is set to launch a more affordable and compact 1080p TV as well as a larger variant of the Mi TV 2 with 4K resolution.

Details are scarce at the moment, but we’re quite excited for what Xiaomi has in store considering how great the original Mi TV 2 was. Read more »

Xiaomi has just started teasing its forum members about an upcoming mystery announcement about the Mi TV. The post states that news will be made public tomorrow and is described by the slogan: “You asked for something and we heard you”.

The guerrilla marketing scheme has become typical for the Chinese tech manufacturer and, as usual, it is already giving results. The forum is booming with user speculations, guesses and hunches about what the announcement might be. Read more »

Samsung came under fire recently for listening to conversations on its Smart TVs and then sending the data unencrypted over to its servers. Samsung responded by saying that the television on which this was found was an older model and newer models don’t have this issue.

Unfortunately for Samsung, the researchers at Pentest Partners found even the new TVs exhibit the same behavior. While the previous test featured the UE46ES8000 model from around two years ago, the new test featured the UE55HU7500 model launched last year and still on sale. Even on this model it was noted that data was being sent in plaintext. Read more »

Samsung is on top of the food chain when it comes to a lot of tech markets. If there is one thing the Korean giant is extremely good at it has to be display panels. Samsung has built a formidable reputation as a major innovator in this area as well as a top supplier both to third-party manufacturers and consumer markets.

According to DisplaySearch, a leader in global market research, Samsung Electronics has been holding the first place in annual TV sales worldwide for the last 9 years straight. In 2014 the Korean manufacturer accounted for 29.2% of the sales, a huge leap from 11.9% in 2013. The number is even more impressive for North America, where Samsung dwarfs competition with a 35.3% TV market share. Read more »

On a dedicated event in Seoul today LG Electronics pulled the wraps off its global TV lineup for the 2015 model year. The company’s newly-adopted DUAL PREMIUM strategy plans to put LG in a leading position in the global premium TV market, while simultaneously expanding the upmarket segment as a whole.

The company is launching a range of OLED TV sets with 55″, 65″ and 77″ screens in flat and curved flavors. Read more »

Samsung held a grand press conference at this year’s CES, but most of you surely remember the rather disappointing void of smartphones at the venue. Amidst the sea of home appliances and multimedia service announcements there was still something that captured our interest. The Korean giant unveiled a brand new TV technology, called SUHD and promised it will be available in upcoming models.

There has been little information about these TV sets, except for various size and price speculations and what Samsung already made clear about the technology. Today, however a new leak claims to disclose information about the full SUHD lineup with model numbers and prices. It is reported that the TVs will range from about $2500 all the way to $23,000 which is in no way budget friendly even in the premium segment. They will also be powered by the company’s own OS – Tizen, which is also exciting as the platform is growing at a phenomenal rate. Read more »

Last week, after it was discovered that Samsung’s smart TVs are potentially listening to everything that users say and sharing the collected information, a company spokesperson said, “In all of our Smart TVs we employ industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers’ personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use.” However, apparently that’s not correct, as it has now been discovered that the voice data these TVs send over the internet is not encrypted.

Update: Samsung is aware of the issue and is working on a fix. The company says that new models include encryption, while older devices will get it as an update. Read more »

It’s not surprising that Google’s Chromecast HDMI streaming stick has been quite successful. After all it’s cheap and relatively easy to use, and it can instantly make your TV smarter than it was. Today though we get the first glimpse of just how successful the Chromecast was, at least during last year.

That’s because for the first time ever Google has shared some sales numbers with the media. According to a report out of South Korea, the search giant’s arm in that country has revealed that 10 million Chromecasts were sold globally in 2014. Read more »

The Nexus Player by Asus is now available outside to the Google Play store. The Android 5.0 set-top box is available in major US retailers that include Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg.

Newegg and Amazon are the only ones to offer the Nexus Player online. Read more »

Google has quietly expanded the availability of the Nexus 9 tablet and the Chromecast to two new countries. The lucky winners are New Zealand and Taiwan. Residents of both can head to the Play Store if they want to grab a unit.

The new Nexus 9 is one of the few tablets around with Nvidia’s Tegra K1 chipset with the custom Denver CPU core. Even Nvidia’s own Shield tablet uses the more common Cortex-A15 core. Read more »

Companies’ earnings reports are rarely exciting, but cord-cutters are probably keeping a close eye on Netflix. They’ll be glad to hear that the company is continuing to defy the cable TV model by beating the expectations of Wall Street both in earnings and user base growth.

Home country growth in the US is starting to slow down – “a natural progression in our large US market as we grow” – says Netflix, so expanding internationally is becoming more important. Read more »