SmartThings

Whenever we lose something, one of our first reactions is to ask people for help. We often rely on family members and friends, sometimes even strangers, in the search for lost property. Crowdsourcing has actually become more common on the Internet today, at least when it comes to asking questions or recommendations. That kind of social-based solution has started to also become trendy in item tracking circles, and Samsung's SmartThings Find is adding a new Members service that essentially turns it into a social network.

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Smart home devices and appliances can do a lot of impressive things, especially when they work together with a single command or automated scenario. Almost all of these smart home products and platforms, however, have an intrinsic and almost non-negotiable dependence on the cloud and, therefore, an Internet connection. Following trends in the IoT industry, Samsung is also evolving its SmartThings platform with a new SmartThings Edge framework that, in a nutshell, will allow such smart devices to work faster, more securely, and more reliably by taking the Internet out of the equation.

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Global conditions seem to be conspiring to make us use up more energy these days. The COVID-19 pandemic forced many people to stay at home, consuming more electricity to while away the days. Unusual and extreme weather conditions are also forcing many to fire up their heating or air conditioning more often than usual. In addition to increasing power consumption and carbon footprint, these scenarios also result increased electricity bills. In light of that, Samsung's new SmartThings Energy service wants to help customers reduce their expenses, and it starts by simply knowing how much energy you're using in the first place.

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Samsung has launched its latest generation of SmartThings, with the smart home and connected devices platform promising to make automations easier and actions more stable. The revamped SmartThings gets a new interface, too, following Samsung's release of a version of the app for Windows.

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Device waste is a pretty major issue, and earlier this year, Samsung announced a new SmartThings feature meant to fight against it. Dubbed Galaxy Upcycling at Home, this feature allows you to repurpose old Galaxy phones as IoT devices through the SmartThings app. Today, the Galaxy Upcycling at Home program is expanding with a beta test that's landing in a few major regions around the world.

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Earlier this year, Samsung revealed an enhanced SmartTag it's simply calling the SmartTag+. Functionality is still mostly the same - you'll still attach these SmartTags to items that prone to to being misplaced so you can find them easily - but as the name suggests, SmartTag+ comes with new functionality over its predecessor. Now, Samsung has told when we can expect SmartTag+ to launch.

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A smart home hub is only as useful as the number of languages it can speak. Given the number of disparate smart home platforms available today, it pays to either understand all those or at least have the ability to learn to communicate with other smart home products. That was practically what the SmartThings Link USB dongle did for the NVIDIA SHIELD TV but that dongle itself will lose its ability to speak the SmartThings language when Samsung upgrades its ecosystem in June.

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At its very early Unpacked 2021 event last week, Samsung didn't just announce a new Galaxy S21 smartphone, Galaxy Buds Pro earbuds, and Galaxy Smart Tag trackers. It also announced a collaboration that made sense but few probably expected would ever happen. Samsung revealed that it was nurturing a closer relationship with Google, even in areas where they have competing products, bridging the gap between Samsung's SmartThings IoT platform and Google's Nest-branded devices and Android Auto car platform.

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The Galaxy Watch Active 2 is getting a big update today, as Samsung is pushing SmartThings Find functionality to the watch. First revealed last year, SmartThings Find uses ultra-wideband and Bluetooth Low Energy to locate lost devices that may not be able to connect to the internet. With SmartThings Find rolling out to the Galaxy Watch Active 2 today, we might see it roll out to the company's other wearables before long too.

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Samsung's big Galaxy S21 launch may be coming later this week, but it's home appliances which are getting their moment in the spotlight today. Fresh for CES 2021 are updates in the kitchen, the laundry room, and roving the floors in the shape of a new, smarter robotic vacuum cleaner.

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For those looking to get a smart home set up rolling, there are a number of ecosystems to choose from - Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, Nest, the list goes on. Generally speaking, these ecosystems don't feature a ton of interoperability with one another, but that might be starting to change. Today, Samsung and Google announced that they're teaming up to allow compatibility between SmartThings, Nest, and Google Assistant devices.

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Samsung is hoping to give SmartThings, its connected home platform, a boost, adding new rules support and coaxing device-makers into adding compatibility. Announced at the Samsung Developer Conference 2019 today, the company's annual developer event, SmartThings' new Rules API promises to better link together multiple devices acting on a single command or trigger.

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