TV transformed by smart thinking

LG is upping the ante with a new look for its webOS smart TVs.

IN 2012 and last year we thought LG’s smart TV interface was the best around. That’s the interface you see when you fire up the TV and peruse your options for free-to-air channels, scan your choice of TV apps such as YouTube, Skype or BigPond movies, access games ­libraries, and content from connected set-top-boxes, consoles and storage devices.

But this year the Korean manufacturer has scrapped that interface and replaced it with one that instead features an app launcher, similar in principle to the launcher along the bottom of an Apple MacBook screen.

It features your most popular apps and is totally different to what we’ve seen on smart TVs ­before.

Last week, I trialled this new ­interface on one of LG’s new smart TVs, the 65UB980T, a new 65-inch 4K ultra-high-definition TV. I found it intuitive to use yet powerful.

The story behind LG’s new interface is fascinating as it is based on a hand-me-down operating system called webOS that was originally developed by Palm, once the maker of personal digital assistants (PDAs).

In 2010, Hewlett-Packard paid $1 billion to buy Palm and redeveloped webOS to run on tablets and smartphones, but failed dram­atically. The ill-fated HP Touchpad tablet featuring webOS lasted just one week on the Australian market.

With nowhere to go, HP sold webOS to LG, which has morphed it into a dedicated operating system for TVs.

The result is a smart TV display totally different to that offered by main rival Samsung. Samsung’s smart TV system is full of innovations such as natural language processing, it can learn your viewing habits and recommend programming, but uses a series of predefined screens for offering content.

In contrast, LG’s offering is based on simplicity and flexibility. There are nine cards (or panels) along the bottom of the screen that you can populate with apps such as BigPond Movies, ABC iview, SBS on Demand, YouTube and AFL Game Analyser. The first nine apps that you place in order in your list of apps and functions, found to the right of the cards, determine what you are likely to watch.

As LG puts it, your apps to the right of the cards are “the future” — what you will watch, while the display of your recently used apps, to the left of the cards, is “the past” — so the launcher is an amalgam of your past, present and future viewing activity.

As I discovered, the cards also can be triggers for connected set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, connected games consoles or any of the TV’s other in-built functions, such as viewing media on smartphones or home PCs, recording TV or sharing a connected smartphone’s screen using mirror casting.

As webOS is multi-tasking, I could go back to a previously launched app and resume viewing from where I left off. This made swapping between tasks quick and easy to engineer. I’d like to see the launcher made even more flexible by letting you increase the number of cards beyond nine — although most people don’t have more than nine routinely used media sources on their TV.

Don’t be fooled: despite its simple interface, this year’s high-end LG smart TVs retain features of previous years.

They include 3D, which uses the cheaper passive glasses and which looks great on a UHD TV, dual play for gaming, and LG’s Magic remote.

You can move the mouse from one end of the 65-inch screen to another with a single flick of the wrist and search in a browser voice.

Voice doesn’t, however, ­operate TV functions. The set has an intriguing set-up function involving a cartoon character called BeanBird which guides you through setting up channels and internet functionality.

There’s also a “device connector” for linking the TV to other set-top boxes.

I do, however, have issues with the lack of Australian content. LG’s US app store includes movies, live TV and TV shows, and apps for ubiquitous movie and TV series sources such as Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon.

In Australia, while there are premium apps for SBS, ABC, Skype, YouTube and Telstra BigPond, there’s no QuickFlix or Foxtel apps such as Presto and Go — at least not yet. To be fair, it’s early days.

As well as 16 premium apps, there are almost 50 installable apps. Some — including the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra app, Daily Motion, Deezer, Al Jazeera and Accuweather 2.0 — promise great entertainment, but I wasn’t blown away by the choice.

LG’s hope is its cross-platform software development kit called Connect SDK. This allows developers to create apps for several ­entertainment platforms simultaneously — which may encourage the developers to take part.

The one mobile app will work with webOS, Google Chromecast, Roku (streaming player) and Amazon streaming, but that’s in the US.

There will need to be similar encouraging measures for Aus­tralians to take part in developing relevant local apps.

Australia does get some rudimentary 3D movie offerings, Disney movies and “documentaries” — these mainly include doco features on travelling in South Korea, such as Soul of Seoul, and 3D reviews of hotels in Abu Dhabi.

Clearly, expanding Australian content is a work in progress.

The new smart TV interface also exhibits issues found in smart TVs generally: codecs that can’t necessarily play all movie and video formats, and, when viewing home network content, an inability to group content by folder. So if you have 40 Star Trek TV episodes on your hard drive, you have to scroll through them to access the next item.

Sites such as My Movies and Plex lead the way in showing how content can be beautifully presented on the big screen.

But don’t let a few of my moans get in the way of what’s a brave and innovative step by LG to massively simplify the concept of the smart TV.

Its content offering can only improve in time and give the competition a shake.

Rating: 8/10

Price: $5499 (65-inch model)