.jpg&c=0&w=700 "The Maharaja of Gondal: Mr AMG")
In a case of product synergy no one asked for, you can now control Samsung’s 2025 line of televisions with the company’s smartwatches. Yep, for those cases where your remote goes M.I.A. to the Isle of Lost Things, you can still watch the latest episode of Daredevil: Born Again or The Residence but you will need an a Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 or Galaxy Watch Ultra…and a brand new Samsung TV. I recently had the opportunity to try out the new technology with the Samsung Neo QLED 4K (QN90F), one of the company’s newest flagship televisions and while it takes some getting used to, it works fairly well.
For my demo, I donned the Galaxy Watch Ultra, where I controlled the QN90F via a series of gesture controls and strategic arm movements. A cursor appears when the TV and smartwatch are connected that can be used like a cursor by moving your arm around. Think of a one-man Hokey-Pokey session and you have a picture of what I looked like. In order to select something like a streaming service, you simply hover over the desired icon and pinch your fingers together. It’s actually more responsive than I expected. When I wanted to exit a show, I made a fist and when I needed to access the home screen I did it twice. To scroll, I ran my ringer along the interior of the watch bezel.
Connecting the Watch Ultra to the QN90F is a little counterintuitive as you have to disable the Universal Gestures on the watch. From there, you need to shake your wrist until a message pops up on the TV informing you the devices are connected. Simultaneously, a Pointer Mode prompt appears on the watch and you’re ready to go. You can also adjust the volume via the watch which is cool in a pinch.
While the watch controls work as advertised, they can also need a little help. For instance, I hate seeing the cursor and the scroll bar when I’m watching a YouTube video. Usually, all you have to do is stop moving the mouse and those distracting elements will disappear, especially on a screen as pretty as the QN90F’s. But what happens when the pointer is connected to your arm? I never really thought about how much I fidgeted around until I had to focus on keeping my arm still to get rid of the mouse.
A couple of other things that need some tweaking are the precision and hit boxes. Using your arm to navigate is fine for larger, sweeping movements, but when it comes to smaller movements like hovering over the play/pause button in YouTube or grabbing and dragging the cursor in the progress bar can be a hassle. Also, I really want a way to adjust the scroll speed on the bezel control because if you’re not very deliberate with how you move your finger along that bezel, you can zoom past whatever you’re looking for at breakneck speed which is no bueno.
Overall, using your smartwatch is a cool gimmick, but I’m not sure if there’s enough there to move it into must-have tech feature. To really be viable, I think there’d have to be a way to input channels or at least switch to your favorite channels, but that’s asking a lot of a relatively tiny screen designed to tell time and track your exercise.
