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Samsung's new dev tools bring multiscreen capabilities to TV and mobile
Samsung has just announced several new and improved software development kits (SDK) at its first ever developers conference in San Francisco that could mean lots more features to your existing Samsung hardware. The biggest news is a new multiscreen SDK that would allow users to share content across various Samsung devices, be it smartphones or their television set, thanks to a new cloud-based publishing system. Especially exciting for gamers, Samsung has also partnered with Unity technologies to create a multiscreen gaming engine that allows for gaming on any TV -- as long as you use a Samsung phone or tablet of course. It also showed off the Gamepad attachment that was revealed at IFA this year. "We take the very best of what Unity is, and combine it with the best of what Samsung has to offer," said David Helgason, CEO of Unity, on stage. Speaking of smartphones and tablets, Samsung has also released a fresh mobile SDK that would lead to a number of improvements to current handsets. There's a lot to dig through here, but a few notable ones include more precise S-Pen controls, new visual animations, seamless handwriting recognition, and a multi-window capability that lets you run multiple resizable apps simultaneously. An example of this was shown at the conference using the new Twitter app, where you can tweet and browse the web at the same time. What especially delighted us is something called Samsung Chord, which essentially promises peer to peer connections across devices. A stage demonstration showed how you could use Chord to "pinch" the screens of two side-by-side tablets to instantly connect them and start playing a joint game of air hockey. Going back to televisions, the company also unveiled a revised Smart TV 5.0 SDK that plays well with the multiscreen SDK mentioned earlier. This allows content partners like Pandora to incorporate Samsung Connect so that you can broadcast music from your phone to your home entertainment system. Smart TV 5.0 also now supports close captioning for video apps and just better search overall. Last but not least, the Korean firm also revealed the Knox SDK that lets corporate workers bring their own Galaxy device into their work environment without compromising security. We've barely scratched the surface of what Samsung has released to the developer community today, and we're sure devs are chomping at the bit to get at the new tools. David Eun, Executive VP and head of Samsung's Open Innovation Center, said on stage that he hopes all this development will result in better convergence between devices, stating that "we are well on our way to the connected home." While we can't say that'll actually happen, we do admit we're excited to see what consumers will get out of today's announcements. Interested parties can check out the press release after the break to find out more. Update: Courtesy of Android Central, we've embedded the stream of Samsung's keynote presentation, right after the break.
