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(Pocket-lint) - Samsung's latest addition to its smart home range is called the Samsung Home Hub. It's designed to deliver "a connected, personalized home experience to meet the needs of the whole family."

Essentially, it's a tablet with a docking station and it's designed to work much like the universal remotes of yore. This time, rather than controlling your fancy AV system, the device will be able to control everything in the Samsung SmartThings ecosystem.

The SmartThings ecosystem is vast, covering everything from light bulbs to refrigerators and washing machines. It also supports Matter, the upcoming protocol that aims to unify the smart home experience, so interoperability shouldn't cause much of a problem in the future.

The dock includes additional high-performance microphones to allow voice commands to be picked up in the wider room while the tablet is docked.

Amazon and Google both have their own hubs in the form of Echo Show and Nest Hub, these devices are designed to sit in one place and need to be plugged into the wall. The new Samsung Home Hub can be removed from its charging station and used anywhere in the house.

How useful that will be remains to be seen, especially since you can just install the SmartThings app on your existing phone or tablet - but that sets the device apart nonetheless.

The Home Hub is expected to launch in Korea in March, with a global launch thereafter, pricing has yet to be announced.

Being a Samsung product, we have no doubt that the hardware will be top notch. We just hope it doesn't require you to use Bixby.