Smart Home Competition
Apple is to release its new smart home platform at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) scheduled for June 2. Samsung Electronics has also developed its smart home business in earnest to provide for the Internet of Things (IoT) era. Under the circumstances, the Smart Home is expected to become a new battlefield between the two arch rivals.
Apple’s new smart home platform is to seek a new breakthrough. It is expected to be interoperable with the new Apple TV box slated to hit the market late this year.
The strategy is quite similar to that of Samsung Electronics. Earlier this year, Samsung unveiled a smartphone and smart watch application for the integrated control and monitoring of washing machines, air conditioners, refrigerators, smart TVs, etc. The smart home application is available on a smart phone running on the 4.0 or higher version of Android and the Samsung Gear 2 and Gear Fit based on the Tizen operating system.
Samsung Electronics is going to unveil its own smart home protocol so as to set up an open-source smart home ecosystem. To this end, the company has worked with the other subsidiaries in the same group, such as Samsung Techwin, Samsung SDS and S One, and entered agreements with Honeywell and Belkin. Samsung Electronics is planning to open the protocol at the developers’ forum in November and demonstrate it at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2014 in January next year.
Other global IT companies and consumer electronics manufacturers are jumping on the bandwagon, too. Google acquired Nest Lab, which develops Internet-based thermostats, in January at a price of US$3.2 billion. LG Electronics released the Home Chat service last month, which allows household appliances to be controlled with a mobile messenger. LG is planning to apply Home Chat to refrigerators, light wave ovens and the like.