The ability to easily navigate yoursmart TVis an important yet often overlooked feature. It’s essentially a computer with an ever-growing number of apps, services, and features available, and plenty of settings that need to be adjusted based on a variety of factors. There’s a lot going on, and it needs to be easy to move around, control, and find what you need as quickly as possible.
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Tizen and WebOS are among the top operating systems, only found on TVs fromSamsungandLGrespectively. As leaders in the television industry, I put them to the test to see what stood out.
Home screens share similarities
Little separates the experience
It took a while for home screens to catch on for these two companies, but now both Tizen and WebOS offer a central command hub from which to navigate. And they are very, very similar. Previous iterations would pull the home screen up immediately when you turn on the TV, and there’s also a handy button located at the center of both remotes that will take you home.
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They do both feature a generic banner at the top that seems like a waste of space (LG offers ads, but they can be toggled off). There’s potential to improve, but it also could be much worse. Neither is particularly bloated, and while both LG and Samsung want to promote their respective “free” channels so you can watch more commercials, they both – thankfully – keep the home hub fairly clean and easy to navigate.
Across the center of the screen is a row of apps that can be rearranged based on your interests. The icons are big enough to see easily, but not so big that they take up a lot of space. Each app has suggested content below it, whether in the form of new releases, popular titles on specific apps, or specific shows they really want you to watch. There is some degree of customization in changing the order around, but you’ll have to do your own list creation and content curation.
App store finds more in common
Easy to search and download
When it comes to downloading apps, both Tizen and WebOS offer a fairly comprehensive app store that’s easy to navigate and download services. Each boasts many hundreds of options for not just entertainment, but games, news, and work as well. Even so, for most consumers, myself included, there’s only about 10 or 20 that I’ll really need and a few more that I might want. I’m looking at watching content on my favorite streaming service, and both offer all the main apps, including many like Netflix or Amazon Prime, already installed.
LG WebOS is the operating system that runs many LG TVs. The interface is easy to interact with and it offers adaptive features to its environment, so it can dim the picture if it’s bright out or turn up the volume if the noise is loud
With both stores easy to navigate and similarly designed with plenty of the same apps, neither really gets the edge over the other. Both are quality options and, in either case, you likely won’t spend too much time in the app store.
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Settings design favors LG
But appearances are subjective
LG’s settings menu pops up on the top left-hand side of the screen. Before you dive into settings in full, a quick-start menu is available, allowing you to jump directly to some of the more popular settings, instead of going through the entire menu. These options can be toggled and have come in quite handy for me, particularly if I want to quickly change the visual format or adjust the brightness.
The pop-up menu may not take up even half of the screen.
Content can continue to play while you’re searching through settings on a new LG TV. Depending on how deep you go in search of what you need, the pop-up menu may not take up even half of the screen. It’s also somewhat transparent, and with light gray coloring, it’s easy on the eyes.
Meanwhile, Samsung’s settings menu is bluer, and occupies the center of the screen. It can be jarring and annoying to navigate.
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To Samsung’s credit, though, I think the entirety of its settings menu is a little easier to navigate and find what you’re looking for. Some features, like toggling off TruMotion, were buried within settings on the LG TV. Samsung makes it a bit easier to find what you are looking for, although not enough to make me choose its interface. As TVs become more complex, the number of settings continues to grow, meaning navigation is ultimately going to be pretty tedious.
Control comes down to personal preference
Tizen and WebOS have distinct pluses and minuses
The voice feature on LG’s remote is a boon. Pressing and holding the microphone button at the center of the remote allows you to search for a title and ask a variety of questions about the content you’re watching on some, though not all, apps and streaming services. You need to pause for a moment and be sure to speak clearly, but the voice option can save a lot of time and energy when it comes to finding what you want.
Both TVs have virtual assistants built-in, a common feature across most new TVs, but the voice remote is a clear winner.
LG’s remote makes an audible click sound whenever you press any button, while Samsung’s remote produces a softer, gentler sound when used.
However, LG’s manually remote usage isn’t ideal for me for a couple of very specific and picky reasons. It offers a chance to create a cursor so you can navigate the screen using the remote as a mouse, but it requires you to point the remote at the screen. It adds some convenience in some places, but can also make navigation more tedious. More importantly, though, for me, is that LG’s remote makes an audible click sound whenever you press any button, while Samsung’s remote produces a softer, gentler sound when used. I don’t like the sound, and it doesn’t need to be this way.
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Tizen or WebOS: Which should you choose?
It’s close, but LG takes the win
Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of common ground between the operating systems of these two Korean tech giants. Both Tizen and WebOS are exclusive systems found only on their respective TVs, and both are evolved similarly, from a pop-up menu at the bottom to a full-fledged home screen that feels neat but a little impersonal. LG’s latest design looks better, however, and its settings tabs are better suited to those who are frequently changing content types and adjusting the look to optimize the viewing (and gaming) experience.
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Though it’s close, there are extra touches that WebOS offers that put it over the finish first against Tizen.
