Samsung announces new Bespoke smart refrigerators and smart oven
One of the minimalist fridges comes with a giant screen and the oven has no handle
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: An immersive refrigerator
🖥️ Samsung is giving its Bespoke refrigerator a screen bigger than my monitor
❄️ Two other new smart fridges include side-by-side doors and top freezer
🧆 Samsung’s Bespoke AI oven promises to stop you burning food
📅 The appliances will be available Q1 and Q3, respectively
Samsung’s Bespoke line is going to see some updates, in the form of a new Bespoke 4-Door Flex with Family Hub Plus smart refrigerator with a 32-inch screen, two new, more traditional fridge styles and a Bespoke AI Oven that Samsung says will keep you from burning your food, using artificial intelligence.
A big-screen (refrigerator) TV
Starting with the new 4-Door Flex fridge, it looks like the primary upgrade for Samsung’s uber-modern appliance is the giant built-in touchscreen – a full HD affair with no bezels (unless you count the rest of the door as a bezel), which can be used to watch TV using Samsung TV Plus, a Pluto TV-like, ad-supported TV service with picture-in-picture while you follow along with recipes, and when it’s not in use, it can serve as a digital photo frame. Samsung calls it immersive, which is … an interesting way to refer to a fridge screen.
The screen allows you to do other things, of course, including install various apps, talk to Alexa, order your groceries and it serves as a hub for SmartThings devices you may have. Samsung even says it has a dongle coming soon that will allow your fridge to serve as a hub for Zigbee SmartThings products, which would make the fridge the most expensive way possible to replace your Samsung SmartThings hub when it finally dies.
Oh, and you can watch TikTok on it, I guess.
By the by, you won’t need to toss out your old Bespoke fridge and replace it to add Samsung TV or the SmartThings hub capability to your kitchen. Those features actually came with the Samsung Family Hub 7.0 update that was released back in June – if you don’t already have TV on your Samsung refrigerator, try updating it.
New fridges, traditional styles
The other two refrigerators bring older styles to the Bespoke line, with one featuring a side-by-side design and the other a top-mounted freezer. Like other fridges in the line, you’ll be able to choose from stainless steel or colorful glass finishes, with mix-and-match panels available if you want to get kooky with it.
The side-by-side fridge gets an internal auto-fill water pitcher and dual ice maker with two kinds of ice, cubed or what Samsung calls ice bites (they’re just smaller ice cubes). For the patient, the fridge includes an automatically-opening door that can be opened with a tap. It’s unclear from the press release whether that’s the freezer door, refrigerator door, or both.
As for the top-mounted freezer, it sounds like it will be the most simplistic of Samsung’s lineup – the company mentioned nothing about an ice maker or any dispensers of any kind, nor does it appear to have any automated doors. It seems to mostly just be a standard refrigerator with fun panel color options (the company does mention a feature it calls “Optimal Fresh Zone+” with a filter, which it says will eliminate 99.99% of bacteria.
Both refrigerators can be connected to your network and use SmartThings Energy’s AI energy mode, which adjusts the compressor speed and frequency of its defrost cycle based on its usage and environment, to reduce energy consumption.
Bespoke AI oven will tell you what to do
The Bespoke AI oven Samsung announced Monday will keep you from burning your food, according to the company’s press release, using an internal camera and AI features, called AI Pro Cooking, to sense what kind of food your cooking and let you know if it’s starting to get a little too crispy.
Samsung says it’s the first AI cooking appliance verification by UL Solutions, the global safety certification company whose budge you often see on the back of your favorite electronics. The company also claims it can recognize 80 dishes and ingredients, and that if you’re cooking a dish it recognizes with settings the AI Pro Cooking system recommends, it will send you a food warning notification – the press release doesn’t specify what form the notification takes, however.
It’ll also connect to Samsung Health, so if you’re on a diet, it can use your workout stats and dieting goals to recommend meals to you. Some of the features described sound useful, but if I’m being honest, I would almost certainly turn off the AI stuff after a week or two of incessant that my cheese-encrusted casserole is going to make me gain weight or that the deliciously-browned top of my oven-roasted sweet potatoes is burning.
The oven leans into the minimalist look already established by the company’s other Bespoke kitchen appliances, dropping the handle in favor of a push-to-open mechanism. It’ll be available in five design options.
More to come
Samsung is expected to show both products off at CES this week, so hopefully I can make one of my colleagues go poke around on them and answer the burning question: just how immersive is the Bespoke 4-Door Flex with Family Hub Plus smart refrigerator’s 32-inch screen?
Here’s the announced release schedule for all four products:
Samsung Bespoke 4-Door Flex with Family Hub Plus: first half of 2023, North America and Korea
Samsung Bespoke Side-by-Side refrigerator: 1st quarter, 2023, United States
Samsung Bespoke Top-Mounted Freezer refrigerator: March 2023, Thailand, global launch TBD
Samsung Bespoke AI Oven: 3rd quarter, 2023 North America (available now in Europe)