‘It’s not just a PC. It serves as the TV, radio and personal server.’
With the appearance of the smartphone, the age of PCs is said to be waning. The ‘curved 21:9 Cineview All-in-One PC,’ recently unveiled by LG Electronics, utterly smashes this stereotype. Looking at its outer appearance only, there is no significant difference except that it is curved 21:9.
In terms of TV viewing and contents usability, however, it’s not in the same class as conventional PCs. It is all credited to the injection of the best development manpower in the global best TV research center and the core monitor developers. For LG, it was the first ambitious challenge that has never been mounted before.
The key is the ‘Home Drive.’ It is a kind of personal cloud computing service. It allows you to connect to the smartphone, tablet PC or external PC or notebook. You can watch TV or listen to the radio on your PC, or use contents like video, photographs and music.
The recording function is the highlight. You can use the ‘EPG,’ the digital TV program guide, to do the scheduled recording or repeated recording of programs. The developers say that the remote TV scheduled recording is the ‘world’s first such function.’ It has been impossible on any TV or PC until now.
The developers were motivated by none other than ‘customer voice.’ Chung Pil-yong, general manager of the PC Product Planning Team said, “As an increasing number of customers are watching TV on their PCs, there has been a great deal of demand for the ‘external scheduled recording function.’” LG has already developed an independent TV tuner for the first time in the industry to enable users to watch TV without turning on the PC. The remote TV scheduled recording function is yet another innovation following the remarkable TV tuner. LG emphasized that it takes only ‘one second’ before you can watch TV.
The personal server function is also useful. There is no need to use portable disk drives like the USB or the cloud service of a portal site. If you put a file in the Home Drive folder in the Explorer, you can access it from the outside and use it anytime. It can also be your own server. Nam Da-yeong of the PC SW Team said, “You can communicate with the PC from the outside.”
Energy consumption was minimized. The standby mode power consumption is merely 5~7W/h. It is 1/10 of the power consumption for watching videos, i.e. 60~70W/h. Even if it is turned on 24 hours a day, it is quite economical. Won Bok-hee of the PC HW Team said, “On the assumption that the PC is on for 24 hours a day, we conducted sufficient lifecycle tests in a 40℃ laboratory.”
This is the first time that the curved 21:9 monitor is applied. Not only immersion, but also multitasking is supported. It is possible to open two or three Internet windows or run two or three programs on a single monitor. Also, the Excel program can provide wide views without scrolling. If you display the map screen of the portal site, it shows space about 1.5 times wider than an ordinary monitor (16:9). Cho Hong-cheol, PC Marketing Team emphasized, “If you switch from a 21:9 curved monitor to an ordinary monitor (16:9), you will immediately find it awkward and inconvenient.”
