Samsung and Skype have announced that the upcoming Samsung LED 7000 and 8000 series HDTVs will come with built-in Skype software allowing for video and voice chats via your TV.
The first model will begin shipping in the “first half of 2010.”
“Our consumers want their televisions to be a ‘one-stop shop’ for entertainment and communication delivered with the highest quality,” added Kevin Kyungshik Lee, Vice President of Visual Display at Samsung Electronics. “Including Skype on our TVs meets that expectation perfectly. We’re thrilled that Samsung’s consumers can now use our TVs to experience the rich video and voice communication that hundreds of millions of Skype users worldwide enjoy.”
The HDTVs were first introduced at the CES show last month.
You will need to buy and connect a camera, which is available through both companies, and obviously have a Skype account, which can even be created through the remote control of the TV.
“Increasingly Skype users want to communicate away from their computers, particularly when it comes to video calling,” says Jonathan Christensen, General Manager of Platform at Skype. “Thanks to Samsung, Skype is helping even more friends and families benefit from the meaningful connections that Skype’s video and voice calling provides.”
Result for: quality
This weekend, Mozilla released the long-anticipated mobile browser, Firefox Mobile 1.0, for the Nokia Maemo.
Hoping to take market share from more established players like Opera, the Firefox browser will include customizable browser extensions as well as Weave Sync, the bookmark and history-syncing extension.
Nokia’s open source Maemo OS is only available on the N900 and N810, and the first release will also not include Flash support, which Mozilla fired at Adobe about, citing poor standard of quality. For those hoping to use YouTube without a stand-alone app, you can download the YouTube Enabler add-on.
Windows Mobile is next on the timetable, with Android coming third. Hopefully by then it will be a fully workable browser.
Result for: quality
TechOn is reporting today that large OLED panels should become available mainstream starting in 2010, with LG Display planning 20-inch displays for this year and 40-inch displays by 2012.
Says VP Won Kim, in charge of OLED Sales & Marketing at the firm: “They may be expensive, but it will be possible to buy a 40-inch class OLED TV in 2012.”
OLED displays offer superior quality to LED LCD displays, and can be as thin as a a few millimeters.
The current 15-inch OLED display offered by LG has a contrast ratio of 100,000:1 and “color reproducibility range of 98% of the NTSC standard.”
