Samsung TVs are getting new One UI software to go with their phones, and we have mixed feelings about it
Samsung has big news for TV buyers. From 2025, it will unify all its product lines, including the best TVs, under the One UI banner. If you’re not familiar with Samsung’s Android phones, One UI is the flavor of Android: this design sits on top of the operating system and gives each phone a distinctive Samsung personality.
However, if you’re familiar with Samsung’s Android phones, you might understand why we have distinctly mixed feelings about this announcement.
One user interface on Samsung TVs: the good
We’ve reviewed numerous models of Samsung TVs over the years, and while Samsung makes really good televisions, we’re less enthusiastic about the TV operating system. Tizen.
We’ve done an in-depth comparison of the different TV operating systems here, but the short version is that Tizen is the weakest link in Samsung’s TVs: it’s fine in terms of what it does, but what it does isn’t done just as beautiful or in as user-friendly a way as some of its rival operating systems, especially webOS or Roku.
According to Samsung (via FlatpanelsHD), with the move to One UI you’ll get a “coherent product experience” across your different Samsung devices, as well as “software upgrades for seven years.”
It’s important to note that One UI is not an operating system, but an overlay, so it’s very likely that it will sit on top of Tizen rather than Samsung switching to Android TV. But whatever’s underneath, One UI should deliver a very different and hopefully better TV experience. And that could be possible terribly Other: Samsung says One UI 7.0 will have a “brand new UX.” [User Experience] design”.
One UI on Samsung TVs: Not so good
We love One UI. Really and truly. But we don’t always like what Samsung does with it. In our reviews of the Samsung Galaxy S24 and Samsung Galaxy S24 FE, we noted that Samsung tends to hide important features and be a bit complicated: system settings in particular can be “hard to figure out.” In our Galaxy S24 review, we scored the software just a two out of a possible five due to issues that “started to feel like laziness” in an operating system that “pushed me to do more, buy more, and use more” when we wanted just simplicity.
Hence the mixed feelings. One user interface can be great, but Samsung can’t make it that great either – so while we absolutely agree with the idea of an improved interface on Samsung TVs, we’ll defer final judgment until we see what Samsung actually delivers.
