Samsung has big news for TV buyers. From 2025, it will be unifying all of its product lines, including its best TVs, under the banner of One UI. If you're not familiar with Samsung's Android phones, One UI is its flavor of Android: this design sits on top of the operating system to give every phone a distinctive Samsung personality.
If you are familiar with Samsung's Android phones, though, you may understand why we have distinctly mixed feelings about this announcement.
One UI on Samsung TVs: the good
We have reviewed endless models of Samsung TVs over the years, and while Samsung makes really good televisions we're less enthusiastic about its TV operating system. Tizen.
We've put together an in-depth comparison of the various TV operating systems here, but the short version is that Tizen is the weakest link in Samsung's televisions: it's fine in terms of what it does, but what it does isn't done as quite as nicely or in as user-friendly a way as some of its rival operating systems, especially webOS or Roku.
According to Samsung (via FlatpanelsHD), with the move to One UI you'll get a "cohesive product experience" across your various Samsung devices as well as "software upgrades for seven years".
It's important to note that One UI isn't an operating system but an overlay, so it's entirely likely that it'll sit atop Tizen rather than Samsung switching to Android TV. But whatever's underneath, One UI should deliver a very different and hopefully better TV experience. And it could be very different: Samsung says One UI 7.0 will have a "brand new UX [User Experience] design".
One UI on Samsung TVs: the not so good
We like One UI. We really do. But we don't always like what Samsung does with it. In our reviews of the Samsung Galaxy S24 and Samsung Galaxy S24 FE, we noted that Samsung has a tendency to hide important features and to be a little over-complicated: system settings in particular could be "tough to track down". In our Galaxy S24 review we scored its software just two out of a possible five due to problems that "were starting to feel like laziness" in an operating system that was "pushing me to do more, to buy more, and use more" when we just wanted simplicity.
Hence the mixed feelings. One UI can be great, but Samsung can also make it not-so-great – so while we're absolutely on board with the idea of an improved interface on Samsung TVs, we'll reserve final judgement until we see what Samsung actually delivers.
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