Out of Australia: Samsung products that won’t be released down under

Not everything you get your hands on at an international expo is useful for Australians, with quite a few of the things we see not being marked for release locally.

Which actually means there’s no harm in writing about it (provided we tell the bosses we’re not spending too much time on it, of course).

So here are some of the more unusual items we saw last week at Samsung’s Asia Pacific Forum that you probably won’t see in stores in Australia.

Colourful karaoke

Translated literally, “karaoke” apparently means “empty orchestra,” which we can believe if you’ve ever heard the people we go out singing with.

Still, there are a lot of people who are good at this, and who love having a big sound system that’s as loud as they’re intending to be.

The Samsung solution for this appears to be systems offering as much as 2500watts of power, with colourful LEDs lighting up the speakers, USB ports for adding sound, and a whole lot more.

High-end sound is the name of the game, technically, but you can use this for all sorts of things, such as singing your heart out, or just pumping up the volume.

Tangle-free cleaning

One of the common complaints about washing machines is that they can leave clothes in a tangle.

Somewhere between the constant left and right rotational movement of the barrel, your clothes decide to hug and never let go, and then you’re left with these wet garments all wrapped and intertwined with each other.

That’s annoying, but Samsung has come up with a fix.

Instead of just making the barrel rotate from the outside, this washing machine features little rollers on the inside with some sort of air pulsing mechanism, changing the flow of the water and pushing the clothes around through the water.

Samsung calls this “Wobble Technology,” and while it has no plans to launch this in Australia this year, we could see it in future washing machines from the company, so stay tuned.

Cool and tall

We’re used to tall speakers. Truly, we are. Multiple floor stand speakers in a living room or mini home theatre connected up to a decent amplifier is our idea of a setup we want.

But we’ve never had a speaker that pushed out cold air.

In fairness, Samsung’s floor-standing triple fan units aren’t speakers, but they do look like them, and if you had a few of these thrown in your setup for good measure, it might just be the ticket to keeping you cool while you’re surrounded by sound.

Crazy cameras

At CES, we saw that Samsung was making the next cameras in its NX range take on a more retro feel, with some finishes adopting brown and black leather, like the cameras back in the good ‘ol days.

That’s cool, and we’re totally into that. Retro is in, and we love it too, but there are some finishes that just surprise us.

Like gold. Lots and lots of gold.

Not like the gold ring on Nikon lenses, as that’s just a touch of gold on a black lens.

No, Samsung’s interpretation of gold is a proper finish of black and gold, and we suspect it would sort of be like carrying around a gold brick wrapped in black that takes digital photographs.

It even comes with a couple of black lenses with gold rings, so you can convince everyone how awesomely blinged up you are.

Or how about a carbon fibre camera?

We’re actually intrigued by this one, though we doubt Samsung has built carbon fibre into the body here, and has just gone with the finish.

Still, we’d try a carbon fibre camera. No one would ever confuse our camera again.

 

Leigh D. Stark travelled to Samsung Forum in Jakarta, Indonesia as a guest of Samsung Australia