Samsung has a gadget for just about every aspect of your life, so it seems fairly natural that the company would want to invade your home as well. Samsung announced this week two new wall-mounted connected cameras for homes and business called the SmartCam and SmartCam HD to help individuals and business monitor their surroundings at all times.
Samsung’s design here is simple: It wants to integrate into just about every aspect of your life. The SmartCam HD Outdoor and Smartcam HD offer full 1080p HD streaming of their surroundings with 128-degree wide angle lenses. They both work with slow Internet connections and provide full recording playback capabilities. Ostensibly for security, the two relatively low-cost cameras ($179 for the for the Smartcam HD, $229 for the Outdoor) are part of Samsung’s master plan to be one of the pivotal gadget makers in the Internet of Things.
In a demo at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, one of the biggest gadget annual gadget shows in the world, a Samsung Techwin (a division of Samsung) representative said that the two cameras are part of their notion to connect every appliance in people’s homes and businesses. Samsung also makes a variety of televisions, home appliances like dish washers and washer and dryers and, of course, a long list of smartphones and tablets. Samsung is a company that has the wherewithal and product line to produce just about everything in your house; the next step is to connect all of those with each other.
The Samsung representative said the two SmartCams are definitely a piece of that puzzle, but not necessarily the primary piece.
Of course, Samsung is not the first or only company to make mobile-connected surveillance cameras, nor will it be the last. But Samsung’s plans are bigger than just a couple cameras made by one of its subsidiaries. One of the biggest questions for the connected home will be what the central hub device will be. What will everything connect through to provide a simple protocol that a consumer can then easily interface with? Will it be the television? A thermostat-like device like the Nest? Samsung’s SmartCams are ancillary devices that help monitor your home and as such are a piece of the company’s connected home and the Internet of Things plan.
The most pertinent connected home hub in the short-term will likely be the smartphone. The Samsung Techwin SmartCams can be set up through Android or iOS and use Wi-Fi Direct to connect to other devices like a tablet, smartphone or a PC.
