Smart TV is really dumb

A friend of mine asked me to help him buy a tv this week. We went to Best Buy and to Costco to learn what we could and find the right choice in his budget. After talking with people and looking at the various choices, we settled on an LG tv from costco.

We talked with an incredibly informative guy at costco who had great information on all of the TV's, but he was partial to LG's. He made a big deal about LG Apps and how there were tons of them etc. It made absolutely zero impact on our purchase decision, but after we got it home we decided to set it up and see what these apps were all about.

My friend has more patience than I do. I wouldn't have spent any time, but he wanted to know what he had purchased so he spent time going through their app store and this is what he found:

Having Netflix on the TV is pretty cool. You can turn the tv on, select Netflix and be watching something. Netflix + a smart tv rocks for its simplicity. Vudu is a cool idea, but seems kinda expensive ($6 to watch a new release in HD?) and at those prices has little chance of unseating redbox for blu-ray rentals.

Everything else, EVERYTHING, was colossally stupid. Do you want to get on Facebook on your tv? And type things in using a remote control? Yeah, didn't think so.

App after app was poorly executed and hampered by the interface of a remote control. Some things would want a bunch of information and then say "this is not available in your region" despite the fact that you set the region with the tv. At one point we got the error shown above when he was trying something. Gotta love it when a tv can crash and throw a .NET exception...

At the end of the day, "Smart TV" is really, really dumb. I like having Netflix built in, but otherwise I wouldn't spend a single penny to get a tv with apps over a tv without them.

Joel