You can control the latest Samsung TV (and Samsung watches) with your wrist flick
With product synergy, no one asks you now have the ability to control Samsung’s 2025 TV cable through the company’s smartwatch. Yes, for those cases where your remote control MIA to the Lost Things Island, you can still watch the latest episode Daredevil: Rebirth or Residential However, you will need a Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 or Galaxy Watch Ultra…and a brand new Samsung TV. I recently had the opportunity to try out new technology with the Samsung NEO QLED 4K (QN90F), one of the company's latest flagship TVs and although it requires some habit, it works great.
For my demo, I wore the Galaxy Watch Ultra, where I controlled the QN90F through a series of gesture controls and strategic arm movements. When connecting a TV and a smartwatch, a cursor appears and can be used like a cursor by moving your arms. Think of a person’s Hokey-Pakey meeting where you’ll give photos of my appearance. To choose something like streaming services, you just hover over the icon you want and pinch your fingers together. It's actually more sensitive than I expected. I made fists when I wanted to quit the show and I did it twice when I needed to access the home screen. To scroll, I ran the ringtone along the inside of the watch bezel.
It's a bit counterintuitive to connect the watch Ultra to the QN90F, as you have to disable universal gestures on the watch. From there, you need to hold your wrist until a message pops up on the TV telling you that the device is connected. At the same time, a pointer mode prompt appears on the watch, and you can start using it. You can also adjust the volume by the watch in pinch.
They also need some help when watch controls work as advertised. For example, when I watch YouTube videos, I hate to see the cursor and the scrollbar. Usually, all you have to do is stop moving the mouse and the distracting element will disappear, especially on the QN90F's screen. But what happens when the pointer is connected to your arm? I never really thought about how irritable I was before I had to focus on keeping my arms out of the mouse.
Several other things that require some tweaking are precision and hitting the box. Navigating with your arms is OK for larger, sweeping actions, but when it comes to smaller actions, such as hovering over the Play/Pause button in YouTube or grabbing the cursor in the progress bar and dragging the cursor can be cumbersome. Also, I really want a way to adjust the scrolling speed on the bezel controls, because if you are not very intentional about how you move your fingers along the bezel, you can shrink anything you want at bugerneck speed instead of bueno.
Overall, using a smartwatch is a cool head, but I'm not sure if it's enough to move it into the essential technical features. To be really possible, I think there must be a way to enter a channel or at least switch to the channel you like, but this is asking many relatively small screens designed to tell the time and track your exercises.
