Samsung is now bringing its SmartThings smart home platform to existing devices. Retroactively revealing that many of its new releases from throughout 2023 are now able to be turned into hubs, your existing TVs, sounders, and monitors might already be equipped with Matter, Thread, and Zigbee bridge support.
Samsung brings SmartThings hubs to existing gear
Samsung made their exodus from hub hardware manufacturing two years ago, and now we know what the master plan was. Earlier this year, we saw the company debut the new SmartThings Station, which happens to be a wireless phone charger that’s imbued with the tech. At first, most of the items Samsung wished to focus on integrating often needed a dongle to control devices running locally over Zigbee or Thread, but that has all changed. New select 2023 models of products now have SmartThings chips instead, bringing Zigbee, Matter, and Thread hubs to an existing lineup of products.
“The benefit here is greater range — especially for Zigbee. We’ve put together this tech to create multiple Zigbee radios to work together so you can have greater range with multiple hubs in your home.”
Jaeyeon Jung, EVP at Samsung Electronics and head of SmartThings
Going forward, you will be able to activate the hub function on existing devices using the SmartThings app, with the added bonus of all these hubs in your home connecting together to create a bigger network. You can designate one device as the primary hub and the rest as secondary, with all devices connected to the multi-hub network now running locally in order to provide faster response times and greater reliability. And switching out devices for new ones will no longer mess up your entire network – as Samsung is launching a hub replacement feature that automatically migrates your existing devices to a new hub.
There a few different items that now feature the built-in SmartThings hub:
- 27-inch M80 Smart Monitor
- CU7000 and CU8000 Smart TVs
- Samsung HW-Q990C 11.1.4ch Soundbar
- MicroLED TVs
Samsung is also launching two new APIs, the SmartThings Home API and SmartThings Context API. The Home API will allow device makers to build apps that bring in any connected SmartThings-supported devices to their app, allowing it to work with other platforms outside any exclusive compatibility. The SmartThings Context API allows third-party apps to tap into any sensors connected to SmartThings in order to determine a presence for home and away-based functions.
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