imageThe Verge reports that photos of a refrigerator Samsung will premiere at the Consumer Electronics Show next week depict it with a giant LCD touchscreen on the right door, right across from the traditional water/ice dispenser. This isn’t the first Samsung fridge to feature a touchscreen, but it’s certainly the first to have one that big. It looks like someone took a desktop monitor, turned it to portrait orientation, and smacked it on.

If it’s like previous models, it could feature such things as a built-in Evernote app for grocery list tracking, a daily weather app, the ability to connect to a baby monitor, and even a built-in music player. And who knows what else? Certainly, on a screen that size, it would be easy to display images and other media. One of brothers uses his current fridge’s LCD monitor as a digital picture frame, a sort of modern-day equivalent of tacking photos up with fridge magnets. It would be even better with a screen that size—showing single photos blown up to fill the whole screen, or even a collage of several at once.

But who knows what else it might (be hacked to) do? Maybe not e-books—you wouldn’t want to stand in front of your fridge for quite that long—but a screen that size could certainly display current news clippings, in sufficiently large print to read without your glasses. And what if you could Chromecast movies to it?

Although I didn’t quote that part, the Newsweek article I just covered about smartphone innovation declining as other appliances get smarter did specifically mention refrigerators as potentially being one of those other appliances. It’s certainly intriguing to see an example of that very thing come along so soon after I posted it.

Meanwhile, if you want to add a smart display to the front of your refrigerator without having to buy a new fridge, you could always try this Kindle/Raspberry Pi hack I covered in August.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Many families use the refrigerator door for family scheduling and tracking, using either paper or a white-board dry-erase system. With two parents working and three kids signed up for various sports and other activities, keeping track of who needs to be where, at what time, is a struggle.

    A big display on the fridge that can be updated with multiple individual schedules could be really useful.

    It would be even better if it could sync by wi-fi to each family member’s desktop – laptop – tablet – phone to get the most recent updates without having to input the data manually multiple times.

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