Samsung's fun Freestyle, unveiled at CES 2022, turns any surface into a Smart TV

(Image credit: Samsung)

published 5 January 2022

Samsung's making an early bid to top our best projectors guide in 2022: its newly announced Freestyle is a projector that brings Samsung's much-loved Smart TV interface to any surface: the ceiling, a wall, your friends... if you can point the Freestyle at it, you can watch TV on it.

The Freestyle looks like an interesting alternative to the arms race where the best TVs and best OLED TVs are massive: this is aimed at people who want portability rather than pixels.

Take your video and audio wherever you go

The Freestyle is an odd thing. According to Samsung: "Targeted toward Gen Z and millennials, The Freestyle is a projector, smart speaker and ambient lighting device all rolled into one lightweight, portable device". Unlike traditional projectors it can rotate up to 180 degrees to project images anywhere, and it has far field voice control for your favourite personal digital assistant.

The specs are impressive: it can produce up to 100-inch images and has full auto keystone and auto levelling as well as autofocus and 360-degree audio. You can run it off the mains or from a USB-PD battery pack, and you can also stick it into a light socket and power it from that. And when you're not watching things, you can use it as a mood light.

The downsides? It's 550 lumens, which isn't hugely bright, and it's $899. Both of those things rule it out for me, but then I'm very old and don't have the "nomadic experiences" or TikTok accounts of the people Samsung are targeting this at. I think it's very clever and a lot of fun, but I think I'll stick to my front room and one of the best TVs instead.

UK prices haven't been announced but the Freestyle is available now for pre-order in the US.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).