Many years ago at CES some company unveiled a concept of a refrigerator with a TV in it, and it became the poster child for our technology obsession going too far. Years later Samsung has expanded on that idea, and for better or worse, they’ve run with it.
For the uninitiated, the Samsung Family Hub line of refrigerators have a giant, Android powered, touchscreen set in the door. The Family Hub can be used for a number of things from tracking expiration dates, to meal planning, to playing music, to drawing, to controlling smart devices, and even viewing the inside of the refrigerator without opening the door.
The idea is that it will make the refrigerator infinitely more useful as not just a place to keep your food cold, but also a place to keep up with your family. In theory, it’s a great idea. But how is it in practice?
That’s where I come in. I’m like your own personal smart home crash test dummy, happy to lay out my own hard earned dollars to try this stuff out for you so you know what you’re getting into before you buy it. When I was remodeling my kitchen last year we had a little extra in the budget and decided to put it into our appliances. It just so happens that Samsung is one of about four companies currently manufacturing four door refrigerators, which we absolutely wanted, and my wife and I actually agreed this crazy fridge would be worth the extra money. I’ve now owned this thing for a full year and here’s what I have to say about it…
Price
If you want to put a TV in your refrigerator, you have to pay for it! Depending on the day and the retailer, adding the family hub option to your refrigerator could cost as much as $800 extra. From what I’m told, Samsung likes to monkey with the price, and they dictate it to retailers. The 28 cu. ft. 4-door Samsung Family Hub refrigerator in stainless steel that I purchased was around $3000 after some rebates and cost $500 more than its counterpart with no Family Hub.
You can buy a lot with $500. For instance that was almost what I spent on my Breville toaster oven and microwave combined. It’s more than I spent on my last 55″ TCL TV. So tacking that on to the cost of an already expensive refrigerator is asking a lot.
Do I feel its worth it? Yes and no. This is around the same price point as other 4-door refrigerators that don’t have a computer in the door, so I wasn’t too upset about plunking down the additional $500. The thing is, it’s a really locked down version of Android, which limits its usefulness.
How About that TV in the Door?
So the Family Hub is basically a big honking TV right there on your fridge, right? Wrong. You can stream some content through their web portals, such as YouTube, but many sources, like my local news live web broadcast, are blocked. You can only install about 30 apps pre-selected by Samsung, so you’re not going to be able to install your cable company’s app to watch live TV that way either. The only way this truly works as a TV is by mirroring content being played on a late model Samsung TV somewhere else in your house with Smart View. The only use cases I could think of for this are to use it during a party, or if you have a sporting event on in one room and have to go prepare food in the kitchen. And if you’re that fanatical about sports, you probably already have a TV accessible from your kitchen. This would be infinitely more useful as a TV if you had the Android app store accessible and could load official apps from Netflix, Hulu, cable providers, etc.
The App Situation
The Family Hub comes with a whole bunch of Samsung apps, such as Meal Planner, Smart Recipes, Gallery, Weather, etc. Most are serviceable apps that get the job done, but a handful require you to create accounts that you may not want or need in order to use them. The most useful of these has been the meal planner, which my wife sets up every Sunday for the week ahead. We also use the whiteboard and sticky notes quite a bit.
Where the Family Hub really fails is third party apps. Clearly Samsung has restricted this to just the companies they’ve partnered with, and in a year the selection has not expanded. For non-music apps you’re limited to Amazon Dash, Instacart, Fresh Direct, Shop Rite, Nespresso, Uber, Pintrest, GrubHub, Ring, and HomeAdvisor. That’s it. Of these the only one I’ve found useful is Ring, since I am already married to their ecosystem and it automatically shows my front door if someone rings the doorbell. This is a major turnoff and a huge miss on Samsung’s part. What’s more, they don’t seem to care that people complain about it. I don’t expect Samsung to suddenly open this up one day, so this is basically what we’re stuck with.
For music apps, they actually did a decent job. The Family Hub works with Spotify, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeart Radio, TuneIn and NPR. If you’re interested in using this to play music in your kitchen, you’re going to find a service you’re already using somewhere else.
There is a companion app for your phone which is fairly decent. The main draw is that you can use View Inside from anywhere to see what is in your refrigerator. This is very handy if you need to check the contents of your fridge from the supermarket. The only issue I really have with the phone app is that Samsung chose to further restrict what you can access from your phone, so things like the meal planner and lists aren’t available.
Overall, the apps that are available to you seem to be home, food, or music related, but it’s highly likely you’ll find them lacking. To date, I haven’t seen anything to suggest that someone has rooted this OS, so it’s unlikely you’ll be sideloading content any time soon either.
For a full list of apps for the Samsung Family Hub, click here.
The Big Smart Home Whiff
One thing I’d expect from a hub in my home is the ability to control my home. Swing and a miss, Samsung. If you’re someone who exclusively uses Samsung SmartThings in your home, you’re in luck! Samsung has a SmartThings app available in the limited app store, and you can connect the refrigerator to your SmartThings hub to control your home. If you’re not one of the hundreds of people out there who exclusively use SmartThings, sorry, the Family Hub will not control any of your devices.
This is a huge miss on Samsung’s part and something that was a big disappointment for me. I wasn’t expecting them to have a big, beautiful, customizable dashboard that I could use to control devices from multiple manufacturers, but I was expecting at least to have apps for major brands other than Samsung.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out since there are rumors of Samsung abandoning the need for a SmartThings hub and going to a more web-centric architecture. I’m holding out hope of one day at least seeing a Hue app available.
Music
The speaker in this refrigerator is surprisingly loud and clear. There’s a decent amount of bass, but I would say it’s a little lacking in the high range. Between Amazon Music, Pandora and Spotify, I get all the services I need to use this as a music player. You can also pair a phone or other Bluetooth device to play music through the refrigerator. To address the issue of my 2 and 4 year old’s constantly touching the screen to skip the songs, you can even set a pass code on the music apps. Overall this is a pretty well done feature and it gets a ton of use in my house.
Bixby
Oh Bixby, how do I hate thee. Let me count the ways….
Bixby is just a little bit more than useless. To date, the only two ways I ever invoke Bixby are 1- to ask to open the Meal Planner app, and 2- to shout “lower the volume” when my kids jack the volume up to 10.
There are so many things wrong with Bixby I don’t have enough time to sit here and list them all. The most glaring one is timing your request with the window that Bixby is listening for it. If you invoke Bixby by saying “Hi Bixby,” Bixby takes over the screen with a glowing B overlay and plays a reassuring “ding” to let you know its listening. Only if you wait for the glowing B to show up, you’ve already waited too long. If you talk after the “ding” Bixby has already gone off to do something else. If you speak naturally by saying “Hi Bixby (quick pause) open the meal planner” the glowing B will show up around the time you say “planner,” the ding will happen after you’ve finished speaking, and the screen will show Bixby heard “the meal planner.” I have experimented with longer or shorter pauses, waiting for the overlay and/or the ding, and come to the conclusion that it’s totally random and you just have to shout out instructions and hope it understands.
There were a great many reasons why my old Galaxy S7 Edge was the only cell phone I’ve ever punted into a wall, and Bixby was one of them.
View Inside and Meal Suggestions
All Family Hub refrigerators come with three cameras mounted inside the refrigerator area. There are no cameras in the freezers. This allows you to get a good view of the food in your fridge
whether you’re standing right in front of it, or using the phone app from anywhere. My one complaint about it is that you can’t really see anything stored in the doors.
Shortly after I bought the refrigerator, Samsung pushed an update allowing the app to try to identify food in your fridge. Each time you open View Inside, there is a brief pause while it scans your food and adds labels to guess what each item is. The instructions for this feature ask that you store packaged food with the labels facing out so the app can easily identify them. This works roughly zero percent of the time.
We often open this just to laugh at what the AI has decided our food is. Granted identifying tuna in a glass container as hummus is damn close, but it’ll often identify half of my eggs as eggs, and other half as assorted fruit. Cottage cheese stored with the label directly facing the camera will be identified as yogurt. Beer is almost always labeled soda. I put a bottle of Barefoot wine in there with the label right in front of the camera and it called it juice. This last one I happen to agree with. My most hopeful moment was when I put a package of hotdogs in there and hoped to see them identified as “not hotdog,” but alas, it called them sausages.
Using the contents of your refrigerator as a guide, you can turn on meal suggestions. These are often off the wall funny combinations of food with links to recipes I’m often stunned exist. When I walk through first thing in the morning I’ll often see a suggestion like “How about cheese fried steak with lentils and beer for breakfast?” The suggestions are so absurd, and almost always so unhealthy, I’m convinced Samsung is trying to increase the rate of heart failures in America.
The 4-Door Refrigerator
How the drawer freezer is still in existence is beyond me. This is the reason aliens still don’t want to talk to us. I had one of these abominations for six years and will never again. The four door design is a miracle of modern science and needs to be nominated for a Nobel Prize.
Gone are the days of spelunking to the murky depths of frostbitten food. Each side of the freezer has multiple drawers and shelves with even more storage on the doors. Everything slides out for easy access, and its all very well lit.
What’s more, Flex Zone lets you easily convert the right side freezer to be more refrigerator space when you need it! this is a huge help when hosting guests or throwing parties.
A Note About Samsung
One of the hardest things for me when dropping $3k on this refrigerator was putting my faith in the longevity of a Samsung appliance. I’ve owned enough Samsung products to know better. So I wasn’t surprised to find out that its very common to purchase an 8 year warranty with this. This is the only one of the six major appliances I bought with an extended warranty. Samsung makes some feature rich products, but they’re not exactly designed for the long haul.
Overall
Would I recommend you buy a Samsung Family Hub refrigerator? Surprisingly yes, provided you’re willing to accept some risk and limitations. I don’t specifically need it do have all the apps I was hoping it would have, and I don’t walk around grumbling that it was a waste of money because it can’t be my 20th device with a Hue app on it. I would like to see more streaming capabilities to actually use the big screen in the door as a TV more often, and I’d love to see a better integration with the smart home, but it doesn’t really ruin my experience with the fridge. The design of the actual refrigerator is well thought out and it’s a vast improvement over my old drawer freezer GE. The only real complaint I can muster about the refrigerator itself is that the ice maker seems to be designed to give you little to no ice when you just want a few cubes, and all the ice in the hopper when you least expect it.
While I am skeptical of the long term reliability of any Samsung refrigerator, and I’m extremely pessimistic about the prospect of the giant tablet in the door working at a reasonable pace for 10+ years, I think my 8 year warranty should help mitigate a lot of the issues. I’m not one to put faith in an appliance warranty, but I will put faith in my need to use said warranty during the 8 year period.
Between the thoughtful design of the refrigerator and the apps providing just enough function to replace a bunch of calendars and sticky notes and other junk that normally gets strewn about a kitchen I have found the Samsung Family Hub refrigerator to be worth the addition to my kitchen.
