I recently bought an OLED TV from Samsung, the S90C. It is last year's QD-OLED TV from the company, and I got it at a great price as I bought it after the launch of this year's S90D OLED TV.
I am pretty happy with my new TV because I upgraded from a fairly affordable Android TV to a high-end Samsung TV with an OLED display. However, I can't help but notice that Samsung could have offered a few features that even cheaper Android TVs have.
Features that Samsung TVs should copy from Android TV devices
1. Background music playback
My S90C TV is much faster than my older Android TV from Toshiba, most likely due to a chip with high-performance cores. Everything, including browsing, cold reboot, and opening apps, is noticeably faster than the Android TV. However, the S90C can't keep playing music in the background.
The story continues after the video showing Tizen OS in action on a QD-OLED Samsung TV below
When you return from Apple Music or Spotify to the home screen, the music playback stops on Tizen OS TVs. This is likely a limitation of Tizen OS, and Samsung may be able to fix this easily if it wants to.
On Android TV devices, when you play music on Spotify or Amazon Music or any such streaming app and go back to browsing the home screen, the music continues playing in the background.
2. More storage space
Despite being priced over $1,200, the S90C TV (or other high-end TVs from Samsung) has just 4GB of internal storage. The Tizen OS and pre-installed applications consume most of that storage space, leaving less than 700MB of storage space on the TV for your apps.
On my S90C, there are some third-party apps that I will never use, but they can't be uninstalled, and it leaves me with virtually no storage space for installing more apps or storing media locally on the TV itself.
In comparison, most Android TVs have at least 8GB of internal storage space. My Toshiba Android TV still has 3GB of storage space left after I installed all the apps I use daily. Even Android TVs from Sony that launched back in 2015 had 8GB of storage.
3. Remote finder
Another feature I found interesting in some of the cheaper Android TVs is the remote finder. It is common to misplace a TV's remote controller, and finding it could be a pain, especially when you have kids in the house.
Android TVs with this feature have a beeper on the remote controller, and you can use a voice command to activate the remote controller's beeper. Recently, Google even added native support for the remote finder feature to Android 14 TV.
It won't be hard for Samsung to add functionality similar to its Galaxy SmartTag into its SolarCell Remote, which can charge itself using ambient light. If Samsung can add backlit buttons to its TV remote controllers, it would be the cherry on top.
