Samsung Galaxy Home hands-on: Do you want Bixby in your home?

Back in August, Samsung surprised us with the Samsung Galaxy Home. No one was really expecting this smart speaker, because we’d all gone to New York to see the Samsung Galaxy Note 9. Still, it looked to be an interesting device, and Samsung said we would learn more about it at the Samsung Developers Conference in November.

It’s November, and Samsung’s Developer Conference is in full swing. Did we learn anything new?

Not really.

At the conference, Samsung introduced the new Bixby Developers Kit, which allows coders to make new actions for Bixby. You can control things from your home to your car, and the company showed a number of use cases in which the Galaxy Home could be useful using developer-enabled actions. The trouble is, we still don’t know exactly when you’ll be able to get a Galaxy Home or how much it will cost. Samsung’s head of mobile business did say it should launch in April, but nothing has been confirmed yet.

The Samsung Galaxy Home looks like a camping stove. It uses Harman speakers to drive sound. It’s also got far-field microphones that allow let you interact with it from long distances, and it can pinpoint exactly where you are in the room to send sound directly at you.

During my time with the thing, it sounded pretty darn good, but none of that matters if you can’t actually buy it. Market penetration will also likely be difficult for Samsung, especially since so many consumers already have houses filled with Alexa or Google Assistant-powered devices. If you want to use this thing, you’ve got to be all in on Bixby, and as of right now, I’m not sure anyone is willing to do that.

On the plus side, we know that Samsung has partnered with Spotify to make sure the transition of music from your phone to your smart devices are as seamless as possible. While Google Homes and Amazon Echos can also use the service, moving active devices seamlessly can be a little clunky, so it seems Samsung does have the upper hand in this case.

Check out the video above to see exactly what this thing looks like, and let us know, would you buy it?