Team CrunchGear, reporting for duty from the LG press conference. I’m not particularly sure what to expect, but the LG associate on stage right now has promised “smart technology.” Should be fun.
LG opens the show by saying that 2010 was a swell year for the company, with brand recognition having never been higher. The company hopes that 2011 will be a “truly memorable year.”
The theme of the day seems to be smart technology.
A Dr. Scott Ahn takes the stage and promises to “dive right in.” “For LG, 2011 is all about smart technology.”
First up: smart TV. Think Apps and the like.
Next smartphones and other mobile devices. LG says it has “some really great smartphones” coming up this year. One such phone will be the world’s first dual-core CPU phone, and it’s able to play a 1080p video file just fine.
Smarter cooking, cleaning, and cooling. An oven that looks up turkey recipes on Thanksgiving day. An oven that sends text messages to you to remind you to cook your roast. A washing machine that produces warm water results with cold water–think of the energy savings. And best of all, a cleaning robot that knows where it is in your house that will clean your room knowing where everything is–chair here, desk there, etc. A refrigerator that knows when your food is going to go bad and tells you as much.
Home entertainment’s next. LG plans to add more content sources for y’all in the coming year. Hulu Plus, Amazon, Cinema Now. LG admits that all of this goodness is fairly tepid if it’s not easy to use. There’s a fancy new remote control that should make using all the smart TV features as painless as possible. LG also says that, in a focus group it conducted a month ago, consumers were looking to LG before some of the other names out there. You know the names, wink wink.
LG says that one of the complaints consumers had about 3DTV is that they don’t ship with enough glasses to make them worthwhile. So, LG will begin including four pairs of glasses in certain 3DTVs. LG also says the new, exciting features won’t be limited to only the top-of-the-line model as you might often see.
