Now, by saying that the M7 smart monitor would be perfect for a whole bunch of people, I’m not saying it’s actually perfect. It has a few big flaws that limit its appeal in unnecessary and disappointing ways, breaking my cheesy little heart.

On the one hand, the Office 365 and Remote Desktop apps are the big disappointments. For reasons that defy our comprehension, they each operate in ridiculously low resolution, well below the crystal-clear 4K resolution the monitor is capable of, rendering them unusable.

Add to that the high monitor latency and the general sluggishness of Office 365 running – to the point that what’s on the screen is not just a few letters but several. words behind what you just typed – and I’ll say it’s worse than borderline unusable for this app. It is in fact unusable.

If you were hoping to use the M7 for productivity fair by attaching a keyboard and mouse to it, then you are in the class of people that Samsung has inexplicably ignored with this product.

(I myself was very excited about the M7’s remote desktop feature, as I happen to be using a remote desktop in one of my software development machines all the time. Alas, I’m going to have to wait for the next model, which I “ hope I have a decent processor and graphics chip.)

However, all is not lost for minimalist workers (i.e. without a laptop). Since the M7 also supports DeX, you can plug in a late-model Samsung phone with a mouse and keyboard, and use the phone’s processor, rather than the M7’s, to run Android apps on the big screen in one. pretty decent fashion, similar to a laptop.

Plugging a new Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra into the back of the M7 smart monitor gave us a productivity setup that would do the trick if, for example, you had that screen in your vacation home and needed to do a bit of work. .

Again, we were a little disappointed that DeX’s resolution running on the Galaxy S21 Ultra was nowhere near what the screen is capable of, but at least it was sharp enough that we could use it as a replacement for PC for a few hours without going nuts. , as we did when we tried to use Remote Desktop and Office 365 features.

The best option, by far, is plugging in a laptop, mouse, and keyboard, and enjoying that 32-inch 4K display like a proper techie.

The M7 isn’t a great display for use with a gaming laptop (it has an 8 millisecond response time, which is slow by gaming standards and runs at just 60 hertz), but for applications productivity, it’s wonderfully sharp, has good contrast (which hasn’t always been the case with Samsung monitors) and is, of course, wonderfully large.

It’s a bit like Samsung’s excellent Space monitor for sitting in front of all day, but it does a lot more stuff and is a lot cheaper.

And after you’ve spent all day sitting right in front of the M7 working, the next thing to do is sit down, pull out the remote, and spend the night watching TV on it.

Now, it’s not the best TV on the market. If you’re a techie looking for a second screen, the M7 probably won’t even be better than the TV you already own.

It doesn’t have a free-to-air tuner (although that seems to matter less and less with each passing month), it doesn’t have a lot of controls for fine-tuning things like noise reduction and motion blur, and at times it seems like the processor barely handles fast moving objects in UHD content streamed to apps like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

But the M7 does support a lot of streaming apps, and they look perfectly fine considering the price.

This is probably the other blind spot that we have here in the Digital Life Labs. We don’t often consider the price of things.

I assure you that finding a gadget that suits so many people not only in terms of utility but also in terms of price is something that will not happen again.

SMART SAMSUNG M7 MONITOR
Love Very versatile. Excellent value. Excellent productivity monitor.
Do not like Internal productivity apps are horribly low-res.
Price $ 699 for the 32-inch UHD model.