Robots, smart fridges and the thinnest OLED TV ever: LG shows off at CES 2017

LG’s CEO Skott Ahn made a bold promise at the start of the LG CEs2017 press conference: “We’re delivering innovation for a better life”.

Whether you think that delivery got made really depends on how you feel about robots and fancy fridges and how excited you are for OLED TV.

LG saved the best for last, so let’s start there instead, like when you tuck in desert before finishing your greens. The LG W7 OLED TV is undeniably impressive. It’s nicknamed the ‘wallpaper’ because it’s thin: frighteningly thin. The 65-inch model is just 2.57mm thick. I’ll let that sink in. Using magnetic brackets you can mount the TV on a wall and have it sit almost flush. And flush is presumably what you’ll need to be to afford it, although LG politely avoided mentioning the price.

It’s 4K, of course, and support all four type of HDR available. Just as an aside, the different flavour of HDR are starting to become a massive problem and just adding confusion to the process of buying an HDR TV so kudos to LG for supporting the lot.

Home Robots

It wasn’t all TV, however. LG made a big deal over its smart appliances, which use a process called DeepThinq to analyse the way you use them, add in any environmental factors and guess what you need before you even need it.

On the back of that were the robots. The new LG robot vacuum cleaner can distinguish between different types of obstacles and even apologise if it hits a person. The Hub Robot is design to sit around and connect and control all your smart appliances. It’s always listening to you, so you can use natural language to turn on the music or start the washing or whatever you need. It seems basically like what Amazon already does with Alexa, but it has a touch screen smiley face if that’s your jam.

And it’s not just robots for home. LG has a commercial cleaning robot and a robot specifically made to give assistance in airports making it the most niche product I can imagine.

The fancy fridge

On the kitchen side of things LG is making the fanciest damn fridge you ever saw. The Smart InstaView Door-in-Door fridge has a 29-inch HD touch screen on it that, when you knock twice, activates the internal cameras and shows you what’s in the fridge saving you the tireless drudgery of opening a fridge door. We are finally free at last.

It’s also going to tie in with Amazon’s Alex, letting you order food directly from the fridge which will be lovely if it ever comes to Australia. The fridge is also controlled by LG’s WebOS platform, which is what it uses in its smart TVs.

Back to the TVs

Which brings us back to the entertainment side of things. The new 3.5 version of WebOS was mentioned as an aside before LG reveal the latest buzz term you’ll need to know when buying a TV: Nano Cell. LG reckons this is the next evolution for LED TVs. The Nano Cells absorb additional wavelegnths of light, making colours more accurate, giving you up to a billion colours and even reducing TV glow. So while LG is definitely putting a lot of eggs in the OLED basket, it’s not forgetting us little people who still buy LED.