We are big on CE products that are practical, perform functions efficiently, and are not exorbitantly expensive, all relatively simple goals, although there are many CE products that do not fill even these basic parameters.  While we have yet to put our hands on the specific Samsung (005930.KS) device mentioned below, that was announced at CES 2023, we see the device, if it lives up to its promotion, as one that might fill the bill.  The device is called the Samsung Smartthings Station and will be released in Korea (and likely the US) next month.  This is a relatively simple device that represents the ‘new world’ in smart home devices promised by the new ‘Matter’ connectivity standard, that allows Matter enabled products to interoperate with other devices and controllers, as opposed to forcing the users to use proprietary controlling devices.
In the pre-Matter world, you might have a lighting dimmer system that you controlled with wall dimmers, a handheld controller, or a smartphone app, and at the same time you might have automated curtains that operated with another handheld controller or app.  Then there was your smart TV, with its own remote, unless you are using an external Roku (ROKU) device, for which there was another controller, and the list goes on with doorbells, leak sensors, smart refrigerators, and a variety of other devices, all of which needed some sort of controller or app, mostly proprietary.  There are many ‘hubs’, which act as central control points for a number of devices, but again most are able to work only with devices made by a specific brand, so smart homes tend to be a mass of proprietary systems that did not talk to each other.
Matter is to change that, with a standard that can be adopted by any device, brand, or smart product, giving it almost universal communication ability with other devices, and allowing the user to decide which controller he or she might want to use once they become ‘Matter’ enabled.  So, in theory, users should eventually be able to control all of the smart devices in their homes with a single controller (of their choice), although adoption will take some time and some older legacy existing devices might never become Matter enabled.
Samsung’s device is a simple one, and supports Matter, Thread[1], and Zigbee, and at ~$60 is the least expensive border router currently available that supports Thread and Matter, allowing home devices to be connected in a mesh configuration.  This allows for better communication between devices on the network and in most cases a larger reach for the network.  Samsung’s iOS is also the only OS that currently supports Matter, other than Apple’s (AAPL) iOS, with Google (GOOG) Home and Amazon (AMZN) Alexa, expected to add Matter support to their OS’s later this year.  Samsung is spreading out the Matter coverage across its own product line, with the Samsung Family Fridge line, , Samsung TVs, and Samsung monitors getting the upgrade in March and others to follow later this year.
The device itself is a wireless charger and supports three ‘routines’ with a simple press of the device.  The routines are set by the user and can operate a single function, such as turning on the lights, or a sequence of functions, such as turning on lights while opening curtains and turning on a smart speaker.  But here’s where it gets better…  Scenarios can be programmed into the device that are actuated by placing your phone on the charger, such as one might do before going to bed.  This can be set to trigger a routine that could close curtains, turn off lights, and turn down the heat, all of which would be reversed automatically when the phone is picked up from the charger the next morning, and we note that as long as the devices are Matter enabled, it does not matter which brand they are produced by, they would all operate under the Samsung device.
Not to be outdone by Apple, Samsung also includes the ability to find Matter devices within the home network range, so misplaced smartphones can be triggered to ring wherever they might be, and items equipped with smart tags, will contact the system and sends an e-mail or text to the user whenever they leave or enter the network area, so if a dog with a tagged collar gets out, the user will be immediately notified.  Of course this means that anyone trying to sneak out of the house or sneaking back in will generate the same notification if they have their smartphone with them, so errant spouses and sneaky teenagers beware…
All in, at least on the surface, Samsung has taken a set of simple but useful functions and put them in what is a relatively low-priced package that has at least some intrinsic value on its own (wireless charger).  Our only concern would be how difficult the device is to pair (attach to other devices) and program, which have been stumbling blocks for earlier smart devices, although Matter itself is said to make those functions a bit more intuitive.  More philosophically, Samsung, who abandon the smart home hardware business roughly three years ago, seems to have thought this re-entrance through, even stating that the company would rather embed its smart home technology in its products rather than creating branded hardware, a bit of a change for a company known for its CE hardware, although the SmartThings Station is just that, a branded product.  That said, with Matter leveling the playing field, consumers will have infinitely more choices about sensors, controllers, and applications, and the first Matter offering from Samsung seems to show that they are working toward making their smart home products practical rather than forcing consumers toward expensive proprietary hardware.


[1] Thread is a Wi-Fi mesh network protocol that extends and enhances IoT devices that can extend wireless networks of varying types including Wi-Fi, Ethernet, LTE, 5G an others, using low power and low latency connections between all devices, essentially a self-healing network. 

​More on Matter:
“Will it Matter?” – 07/21/22
“Apple Makes it Easy to Fix an iPhone, Mostly” – 09/20/22
“Will It Matter?” – 10/06/22
“More On Matter” – 10/13/22
“It’s a Complicated Matter” – 11/14/22
“What’s the Matter Now?” – 11/30/22
 

​In the past we have noted the excitement behind what is expected to be a way for the smart home industry to lose the shackles of interoperability issues with a new industry standard known as ‘Matter’, essentially a communication layer that acts as an interface between smart devices, systems, and users.  For years the smart home industry has been ripe with dedicated systems and devices that required the user to perform relatively difficult procedures to attach devices to networks and to maintain separate applications to control the devices of each manufacturer.  Not only did this make it burdensome and expensive for the consumer, but is also expensive for the manufacturer who was tasked with designing, adapting, maintaining and improving their hardware and software, along with developing interfaces, if any, with other branded products.
The Connectivity Standards Alliance that maintains ‘Matter’ has over 400 member that support the project, with ‘Promoter’ level members Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Huawei (pvt), Infineon (INTC), LG (066570.KS), Texas Instruments (TXN), and a variety of other silicon, CE brands, and retailers, and that list expands across a list of ‘participants’ and adopters that pretty much covers the CE world’s gamut.  The idea is to allow all of these smart home devices to interoperate, giving the consumer the choice as to which branded device they wish to use to control all of the various branded devices they have in their homes.  Not only will this make the consumer happy but it will allow brands to focus on developing higher quality and more useful products without having to maintain proprietary network silicon or interfaces that don’t relate to current products.
Of course this sounds great and if successful would be a significant boost to the ‘smart’ device world, which includes IoT as the standard can be applied down to the individual sensor level.  And would enhance the development of a variety of wireless protocols that could be chosen to provide the best connectivity in different situations, all with the common ‘Matter’ overlay, making the type of connectivity essentially transparent to the user.  Chip producers have already begun developing silicon for Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Thread,  and Bluetooth Low Energy networks with the idea that they can combine these wireless types on a single chip, with ‘Matter’ being the standard that allows them all to interoperate and (in theory) be ‘paired’ with any other device with the push of a button.
There is still much to be done to develop ‘Matter’ as it will take the full participation of an entire industry made up of many companies in many countries, all of whom assume that they will benefit from the upheaval we expect will occur when the standard gains device traction.   There will certainly be winners and losers, but at the least ‘Matter’ will allow each company to focus on the areas in which they have expertise, rather than have to develop or maintain ancillary products.  A company that has developed a sensor that can measure the amount of visible and UV light entering a window would not have to develop interfaces to all the systems (lighting, automated shades, etc.) that might use its sensors and can concentrate resources on improving the sensors, while those that might have expertise in user interfaces would now be able to create more useful controlling devices rather than developing interfaces to all of the most popular smart home products.
‘Matter’’s official launch will come this fall and there will be many announcements regarding products and applications that will take advantage of the new standard, but the effects will develop over time as these new products are put into circulation and consumers begin to understand that the smart home world has changed and is no longer forcing them to buy dedicated hardware for each application.  It will take time but if the industry supports the standard it will matter.

Solving problems should be a goal for consumer electronics products, making life easier for consumers, but rarely do you find a product that solves more than one problem at the same time, but smart poles can.  No not ‘smart Poles’ like Marie Curie or Copernicus, but smart light poles.  Smart lighting has been around for a long time, with daylight or motion sensors telling the lights when to be on or off, saving energy and extending lighting source lifetimes, but today’s versions of smart poles are far more sophisticated.   Lighting poles are a necessary adjunct to any roadway, especially at pedestrian cross-points, and are a requirement in parking and public spaces in most cities and countries.  That said, why use a light pole just for lighting when it can be used for much more?
5G is a developing service that will eventually replace 4G LTE as 4G did with 3G.  5G has lower latency, higher speed, and wider bandwidth than 4G, but has a few limitations that keep the service from living up to full expectations.  Currently there are two ‘flavors’ of 5G, sub-6 and mmWave., however 5G transmission characteristics are different from those of 4G and are less able to be transmitted over long distances, the reason why carriers typically piggyback 5G signals on existing 4G infrastructure.  To make this worse, as 5G frequencies move higher, meaning moving from low and mid 5G (sub6) bands where much 5G infrastructure is currently, to mmWave (higher frequencies) where 5G truly delivers what carriers have been promising, the transmission distance gets even smaller (~500 meters or a circle around a transmission source of about 2/3 of a mile in diameter).  If carriers are serious about offering ‘real’ 5G (mmWave) to fixed and mobile consumers, they will need to populate the world with a grid of transmitters a bit less than a mile apart, which, even using 1 mile apart, would equal 4.43m 5G cell towers in the US for full coverage.
Of course that will never be the case given the vast un-populated spaces in the US, but you get the idea, however in more densely populated areas, such as towns and cities, because mmWave 5G signals are blocked by buildings and even trees, even more transmitters would be needed.  Since no one is going to allow such a density of cellular towers, where can such necessary equipment reside?   How about on lighting poles?  They already have power so additional wiring would not be necessary and 5G base station equipment can be made small enough to easily fit on a pole and they are already in place.  What could be easier?  But wait there’s more… Of course such lighting poles would have IoT capabilities far beyond the simplistic sensors used currently and could transmit weather, traffic, and other data using 5G, but as we look into the future and automobiles become autonomous, or at least electric, how about using the lighting pole as a power source for charging your vehicle while it is parked?
Suddenly the simple light pole goes from this:

​To this:

As always, solving problems in the CE space requires cooperation and while there will be innumerable iterations of smart poles across the US and across the globe, without some basic standards, things could get complicated.  China has just implemented the country’s first national standard for smart light poles, South Korea implemented standards last year, and Taiwan has recently formed an alliance for the same purpose, while here in the US things are a bit more fragmented, sooner or later the various governmental organizations needed (FCC, DOT, etc.) will get together and try to come up with a plan that will likely be criticized by state and local governments who do not want the Federal government telling them what they can or cannot put on their light poles.  That said, industry will likely come up with real standards that will at least give a starting point for suppliers, but as 5G proliferates and 6G (even higher frequencies) begins to take shape, the US will either revert back to the days of antennae on every chimneys or utilize the infrastructure already in place, the lowly light pole.  It make sense and solves problems.

“Smart Home” products are becoming commonplace, especially doorbell cams and other types of home surveillance products, but a recent event in South Korea points to the level of security in many ‘smart home’ systems and how it can lead to some embarrassing situations.  A hacking website recently posted a large number of photos that showed the inside of homes, apartments, and offices in South Korea.  Many views were presented, both inside and outside of these abodes, including photos of the occupants, delivery drivers, parking lots, and pretty much anything near what is called a ‘wall pad’ or mounted device that includes a camera.
Millions of such devices are installed in residential and business settings, many of which use public networks, and while business related webcams are usually password protected and on private networks, wall pads and the like tend to be far less protected and in some cases can open a door to gateways that would allow hackers to control a variety of building resources including both information and building hardware.  In South Korea, a country with a decidedly technological viewpoint, the government has been trying for years to create a standard that would isolate security networks from more simplistic processes, but has faced opposition from both network operators and hardware manufacturers. 
When a hacker enters such a system, the first move would be to change the administrator’s password, which would lock out anyone trying to regain control over the system.  Once this is accomplished, the hacker has control over all aspects of the wall pads and can open the cameras and view anything within range of the ID camera.  The Korean Internet & Security Agency provides a “My PC Care” kit free of charge that can check system vulnerability and camera security, but you have to get one before hackers find their way in, which does not seem to be the case here.  Perhaps a new product might be called for, a sort of ‘privacy curtain’ for wall mounted cameras.  Checking GoFundMe…

LG Electronics (066570.KS) is a CE giant.  #2 in the TV business behind Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and ahead of Sony (SNE).   #2 in the appliance business behind Haier (600690.CH) and ahead of Whirlpool (WHR), and a top 10 global electronics company.  As such, they have little choice but to follow the always trendy ‘Smart Home’ approach to these businesses, helping consumers in their efforts to avoid having to touch said devices, instead using their smartphone or voice to exert control over their homes.  LG recently conducted an online survey of 837 users who had bought a smart home appliance within the last five years (age range 25 – 54) to get an idea of how their lifestyles influence the use of smart home appliances and (here comes LG marketing) ‘fascinating observations on how Smart Homes are redefining the meaning of intelligent living.’
The CE world is full of surveys, most of which are self-serving.  Similar to white papers, they have a bias toward supporting the product, technology, or concept that the writer happens to be associated with, and the LGE survey is no different in that LGE has a stake in the ‘Smart Home’ through its appliances and other CE products that are based on the company’s “ThinQ” control ‘vision’ that allows its devices to be controlled via a smartphone or similar mobile device.  The LGE product line encompasses this ‘vision’ in almost all of its products, at least those on the high-end of the lines, and allows for a multitude of automated functions, some of which are shown in the table below.

​[1] Styler’s are used to reduce dust mites and allergens on clothing

​But motivation for gravitating toward Smart Home products is really the important metric underlying how much consumers are willing to spend and how much they care about things outside of their personal wants and needs, and Fig. 1 shows the ‘motivation’ behind participant responses.  What we don’t know is whether these ‘reasons’ were suggested (multiple choice) or were freely stated by respondents, but at the least they give some indication as to why CE and appliance buyers were interested in Smart Home products.  While ‘Saves Me Money’ was not unexpectedly at the bottom of the chart (5.5%), given that the maxim, “anything that has a name is going to be more expensive” certainly holds true for consumer electronics, however we were surprised to see that ‘saves me time’ was not higher in the survey.  In all fairness, ‘,makes things more useful’ is really an adjunct to ‘saves me time’, so we feel the extra category might have siphoned off some of the ‘saves me time’ respondents, but it is what it is, at least in this survey.

​More surprising was the “Very Satisfied” part of the survey, which broke down buyers who indicated that they were very satisfied with their smart home.  We would have expected that those in the ‘oldest’ category (no age discrimination here) to be less satisfied, and the youngest age category to be the most satisfied.  In fact it was just the opposite, but the explanation, according to LG is that those in the highest age bracket tend to spend more time at home on family activities and therefore appreciate Smart Home products more than those in the youngest group, who are by implication, at home less.
The survey went a bit further with the ‘very satisfied’ question, as it broke out the percentage of ‘very satisfied’ Smart Home product buyers by their ‘knowledge of AI’, refuting the assumption that you had to have some understanding of artificial intelligence to be a supporter of Smart Home products.  According to the survey data those with the least understanding of AI were the highest percentage of the ‘very satisfied’ group, implying that you don’t have to understand the technology in Smart Home products to appreciate its value.  To us this is very self-serving in that it implies that artificial intelligence is a big part of such consumer products, when much of the ‘data’ drawn from Smart Home products is from relatively simple sensors and control systems.  Much of the ‘intelligence’ comes from look-up tables so ‘intelligence’ might be a bit of an exaggeration and few of such products actually ‘learn’ in the same sense as true AI systems do.  Also we doubt that those who indicated they have ‘high’ AI knowledge understand even the basics of natural language processing or object recognition algorithms that are basic forms of AI, so we put little credibility in the table below, which breaks out that data. 

What we did find interesting was the part of the survey that asked about what attracted buyers to Smart Home products.  Participants were given two choices, either ‘new technology’ or ‘performance’ and the results of this part of the survey were a bit more in keeping with what one might expect, with older buyers more interested in performance than trying new technology.  That said, Fig. 3 seems to conflict a bit with Fig. 1 in that other than ‘saves energy’, the top Smart Home benefits to buyers were ‘makes things more enjoyable’, ‘makes things more useful’, and ‘saves me time’, all of which seem to be performance related, yet until the 45 – 49 year old age group, Fig. 3 indicates that performance is the less important feature of Smart Home products.

​The survey itself goes into more detail as to how buyers benefit from such products, breaking it down by particular lifestyles, but the last page of the survey reveals its true colors with the banner “Lifestyle-Enhancing Smart Home is a Win for Everyone”.  Smart Home consumer electronics products are modestly helpful in that they have the potential to make our lives just a bit easier, sometimes in ways that we might not have realized were possible, but lumping things like automatic sound adjustment in TVs into the same category as getting a notification that your wash cycle is completed, is a bit of an oversimplification. 
Differentiation is a key tenet in the consumer electronics business and Smart Home products tend to be a way for brands to make their products stand out, but the idea that there is a universal ‘Smart Home’ system that will allow all of the devices in your home to constantly chatter with each other and keep your home in tip top shape is a fallacy.  Looking just at the number of apps one would need to have on their smartphone to control each brand’s products should be a good indication that we are not at Jetson level, and the simple fact that most Smart Home systems are not compatible with each other makes Smart Home more of a marketing idea than a practical one. 
Surveys are nice but are easily able to present a biased picture, and while this survey did its job of showing how Smart Home products can enhance your lifestyle, it does little to indicate the practicality of such systems.  We have been testing and using what might be called Smart Home products for over 20 years and still wait for the day when a universal hub application can operate them all.  It is certainly better today with smartphone control applications than it was years ago, chasing down a myriad of remote control devices, but the Smart Home industry still has a way to go before it really becomes ‘smart’.

​Global warming or not, this has already been a hot summer for many US residents, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, but down in Texas, where they have a particularly unusual power grid, they have a way of reducing the power burden when those air conditioners are going at full blast.  The “Smart Saver Texas” program, which trades a chance to enter a sweepstakes for the utility’s right to control your thermostat during period of high demand.  While that seems to be a visible ‘opt-in’ program, not all device manufacturers and utility companies make it quite so visible, with language buried in pages of 5 pt type.  Some folks have been surprised when their thermostats were changed without their permission, only to find that somehow they were enrolled in such programs that enabled the utility to control their thermostats.
Of course, if one is notified by the utility that such an event will be taking place, they can reset the thermostat manually or just opt-out of the program completely, but officials have indicate that over 600,000 smart thermostats in 23 different states are under utility control, likely with less than that number actually understand that others can control the temperature of their homes.  There is considerable debate on whether utilities should have this ability and whether it is the responsibility of the device manufacturer or the utility to explain the ramifications to a customer before they sign up, but there is a big contingent that is fighting to keep the government from ‘entering’ people’s homes through the utility company or through your video doorbell.  While IoT is an infinitely beneficial technology it does carry some interesting consequences, which can present issues that we did not think about when we were musing over how great it would be to be able to set your thermostat with you smartphone on the way home.