I'm a big fan of my bedroom TV.
A What Hi-Fi? Awards winner from days gone by, the Samsung UE43TU7100 offers impressive sharpness, gorgeous colours and surprisingly deep blacks – especially considering the sub-£400 price I coughed up.
My main gripe? It's actually nothing to do with the core AV performance – but the sluggish user interface (UI).
The Samsung's Tizen operating system is clean, intuitive and absolutely packed with apps, and at the time of purchase was considered the best in the business.
But on the UE43TU7100, at least, it can take a while to find one of these many apps, as pressing a navigation button more than once results in a noticeable pause.
Scrolling along to one of the streaming services on the far side soon becomes a risky guessing game, wondering when it would freeze and having to work out where you really were on the UI. And using the search function? You better have time to kill...
Obviously, user interfaces and accompanying software have improved quite a bit in the years since my TV was released, but it seems there's still some progress to be made.
My colleague, Lewis Empson, recently wrote a feature about how Dolby Atmos soundbars are embarrassing themselves with their shoddy apps, with LG's app in particular prone to crashing.
Moving to hi-fi, Sonos was long renowned for having one of the best apps around, only for a disastrous 2024 redesign to result in bugs, glitches and glaring feature omissions.
And it's only recently that TVs have been launching with all the major streaming services, both international and local, available to use right away. This isn't helped by the fact that we now live in an age where apps and features can disappear at any time due to licensing disagreements, the end of support or just the whims of competing corporations.
Even the ones that run well have their issues – Amazon's Fire TV OS is a well-oiled, streamlined and user-friendly machine at this point, but the number of ads is reaching the point of overwhelm.
Many of these companies are hardware-focused, so it's perhaps not surprising that software is not their forte. But given that some of them are literal billion-dollar corporations, is it too much to ask for their software to competently do the basics?
What Hi-Fi? will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and it's safe to say that the industry has undergone significant changes in that time. Gone are the days when most people were happy to simply hit play on a tape or disc.
Now almost every piece of AV kit will come with some sort of operating system, smart functionality or, of course, an app. Hardware companies have had to play catch-up, and there were likely to be some hiccups along the road as companies, both new and old, embraced these new technologies and expectations.
But we've come a long way since the advent of the smartphone, apps and streaming, and yet as more issues are ironed out, new ones appear. Our increasingly complex demands continue to mean software is often left as an afterthought to be fixed with a later update.
As my commitment to my trusty Samsung TV will attest, picture and sound performance will, of course, remain the main draw when it comes to purchasing AV products. But is it too much to ask to get satisfying software too?
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