LG Will Soon Have Its Own “Smart Sign”

January 20, 2014 by Dave Haynes

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I recently saw an LG presentation that indicates the company will soon start marketing a rival product to the Samsung SmartSignage platform.

The “system on chip” design – essentially a smartphone/tablet CPU embedded in a commercial display panel – looks very similar to the Samsung product announced and released about a year ago.

The big difference with the LG “Smart Platform” is that it is based around LG’s revival of the Palm smart device operating system, Web OS.  LG made a splash a couple of weeks ago at CES by announcing Web OS was back, for use with Smart TVs. That development immediately made me wonder if this was a signal of what LG would do in digital signage.

The specs look about the same as the current Samsung SSP (so not all that powerful), HTML5 is supported.

LG doing this was kinda inevitable, even if the marketplace take-up so far for SSP has been fairly slow. Samsung has been a little challenged by restrictions on how its units can be developed to. I’m not sure whether Web OS will be a big roadblock, or pretty simple to plug into for software companies.

An SDK is supposed to be available in early Q2.

We’ll see if demo units show up in a few weeks at DSE.

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