LG announce latest in TV’s – the big move is in the software

Once you wrap your head around the roll-able TV they announced earlier, get a load of the software updates they’re bringing to the 2019 range of televisions.

First and foremost is a nice change to the LG ThinQ AI system – which now incorporates Amazon Alexa! Moving forward your LG TV will have two separate buttons, one for Google Assistant/ThinQ Assistant and an Amazon button, giving you direct access to Alexa. Ultimately this is in the name of inclusiveness, and it’s nice to see a bit of collaboration.

Not a Google person? Not a fan of Alexa? Well it’s a damn good thing that LG are also announcing Apple Airplay support. We’re not talking entire iTunes apps and full environment support like Samsung have shown off – but the content streaming is the big fish, and LG have it locked in.

There have been a few fresh changes to the layout on the new generation of LG TV’s, one that will intelligently sort or otherwise preference apps you’re more likely to use – which is nice but nothing groudbreaking. The shame in this is that there’s no backward compatibility, in other words these updates will NOT be available on any old LG televisions.

And finally AI 5.1 virtual surround sound built-in. We had a demo of what this sounds like and truly I was impressed. The sheer difference between stock television audio and the rich, deep virtual surround was phenomenal. That’ll be a brilliant addition to the fleet so keep your eyes on LG this year as they look to pack a serious punch.

It would be amiss of me to give you the latest in LG TV’s without at least mentioning that their 8K 88-inch beast they announced at IFA has been on display here at CES and it looks amazing. With 33-million pixels, this OLED is absolutely STUNNING. All of the above software updates will be available on their 88Z9.

[ces19]