Samsung's Eco Remote magically charges over the air, comes with 2022 QLED TVs

(Image credit: Samsung)

published 4 January 2022

The best Samsung TVs of 2022 will have something really special: a remote control that recharges like magic. The newly announced Samsung Eco Remote 2022 will accompany high end lifestyle models such as Samsung The Frame, but we hope the tech will move to less expensive Samsungs, too.

The Eco Remote Samsung unveiled at CES 2022 appears to work by magic, but of course it's just tech: really interesting and useful tech that steals power from the sky.

The future of charging (for little things at least)

This isn't the first Eco Remote from Samsung – some of the best Samsung TVs in 2021 got the first generation version – but the 2022 incarnation builds on its predecessor's solar power by adding RF harvesting, which can turn the radio waves from your Wi-Fi router into energy. You can also use USB-C, which is much less interesting but a whole lot faster.

RF harvesting only works with very low-powered devices – the signals are just too low-powered to handle anything power-hungry, despite what the the "Wi-Fi fries your brain" lot on the internet would have you believe – but when you consider how many batteries low-powered devices use globally, it's a massive environmental step forward. Samsung reckons that by using solar and RF-powered devices we could prevent 99 million batteries going into landfill over just seven years.

This won't be the last Samsung ECO remote: it's also working on a version you can charge from kinetic energy, such as shaking it. But that's in the future: for now, the Eco Remote is all about making, or rather taking, waves.

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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).