LG's webOS 3.0 Platform Lands UL 'Verification' for IoT Device Smart Home Compatibility
LG's third-generation webOS 3.0 smart TV platform to be showcased at CES has landed UL “verification” for its compatibility with IoT devices in the home, LG said in a Tuesday announcement.
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The verification means that once connected, LG smart TVs with webOS 3.0 “will be able to display the status of a user's various smart appliances, thereby acting as an interface between users and their devices,” LG said. Through the TV, users will be able to control specific home appliances such as refrigerators, air conditioners or washing machines that are connected to the Internet, it said. Through the "IoTV" app, homeowners will be able adjust to the brightness of the lights in the room or change the temperature setting of the air conditioner with just a touch of a button, it said.
The “main hallmarks” of webOS 3.0 will continue to be “what they’ve been from the beginning -- simple switching, simple discovery, simple connection,” Tim Alessi, LG Electronics director-new product development, home entertainment products, told a recent media briefing to highlight LG's CES trends.
LG has “constantly worked on” the webOS platform ever since LG first introduced it, Alessi said. “As good as we think it is now, we’re always looking for opportunities to improve it.” With webOS 3.0, “there’s a whole bunch of improvements that we’ve made,” and those will be on display at LG's CES booth, Alessi said. One key improvement of webOS 3.0 will be to the platform’s “magic remote” functionality, he said. “The magic remote has been very popular and we’ve been improving it constantly.”
Last year, LG added a numeric keypad on the magic remote “for direct channel-tuning through your cable box,” he said. “This year, just to make it even more usable and hopefully to be able to eliminate your satellite or cable remote completely, we added a power button for the set-top box, which wasn’t there” before, he said. Also new this year on the magic remote are navigational buttons, “so you can control your DVR directly with pause and playback, without going through a virtual on-screen menu,” he said.
Through a “magic mobile connection” function on webOS 3.0, users “can register up to five smartphones” to display mobile apps on the big screen, Alessi said. “This makes it really simple if you want to display videos or photos from your phone,” he said. Another webOS 3.0 feature, called “magic zoom,” allows one to “enlarge the screen up to 500 percent without distorting it,” he said. Its functionality is well-suited, for example, to a viewer who wants to “zero in” on a favorite golfer, he said. “With 4K Ultra HD resolution to begin with, you still get a very sharp and detailed picture,” he said.
In 2015, LG added the “live channel” feature to the webOS platform, Alessi said. The feature allowed one to display up to eight favorite channels on screen, he said. With webOS 3.0, “we expanded that to 10 and also made it a little bit easier to register channels,” he said. There’s now also the opportunity to display not only favorite channels, but also favorite programs, he said. Another feature new to webOS 3.0, is a “music player” app that plays music through the webOS 3.0 TV speakers, even when the TV is off, he said.