The Consumer Electronics Show may still be a long way from now, but South Korean tech giant LG has just unveiled a new smart speaker that looks a tad familiar with e-commerce giant Amazon's Echo. Recently, LG has announced its SmarThinQ Hub, a smart home hub that also features an LCD display to give way for controlling intelligent appliances and sensors, as well as streaming music.
The LG SmarThinQ Hub is the South Korean tech giant's way of hopping aboard the smart speaker bandwagon. Its design closely resembles the Amazon Echo, but LG is shipping its smart speaker as a gateway to a user's connected home instead of a voice-activated personal assistant
The LG SmarThinQ Hub is a cylindrical device that features a built-in speaker, as well as a 3.5-inch colored LCD display on the slanted top of the device. LG says that not only will the display show a user's basic information such as the time and date and the weather, but it will also show calendar alerts from the user's mobile device.
However, the details are still parse. It is also unclear if the SmarThinQ Hub will also display other smartphone notifications such as calls, texts, social media notifications and so forth similar to how smartwatches handle them.
As far as compatibility goes, the SmarThinQ Hub can work well with a number of devices from other smartphone vendors and service providers that support the AllJoyn®Alliance framework. According to LG, the company is now in partnership with Lowe's, which is also known as one of the largest hardware retail chains in order to integrate the company's smart devices with Lowe's Iris smart home services.
Furthermore, the press release notes that LG's partnerships with other providers will serve as an advantage for the company's smart home system to prioritize support for devices with different manufacturers.
