Samsung acknowledged that fact and the friendliness of the name Sammy but didn’t commit to any rollout of the extra wake word. Sammy is easy to say, to the point that it’s surprising it hasn’t been an option until now, especially in English speaking countries. Complaints about pronunciation may have prompted the additional option on the smart speaker. The new wake word was announced by Samsung on its South Korean website as an alternative to the standard “Hi, Bixby” wake word used to get the attention of the AI until now.

The Galaxy Home Mini is still exclusively available in South Korea, raising questions about why the new wake word isn’t available on the many smartphones worldwide that use Bixby and what that portends for the voice assistant. So, despite the solid and consistent performance, the lack of support for the latest media takes the shine of what could have been a great product.Īll tests performed using Verbatim branded media and Nero burning software.Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant can now be awoken by saying, “Hey, Sammy or “Sammy-ya,” but only on the Galaxy Home Mini smart speaker. The Samsung WriteMaster TS-H552 is an undeniably fast drive, but its specs are the limiting factor. But even taking this low price into account, for about £3 more you could have the NEC ND-3540A and get faster performance and better media support. Of course if you want just the bare drive, you should be able to pick it up for around the £30 mark, making the TS-H552 a pretty attractive proposition for anyone on a tight budget. When looking at the price, you have to remember that this is the retail box, so £42.29 isn’t too bad. I’ve never seen the Ultra Speed + logo before, but there’s no denying that this drive can burn CD media quickly, so whatever it does, it works. The fascia sports logos for DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW and CD-RW Ultra Speed +. There’s a single eject button, an indicator light and a manual eject hole. The drive itself looks fairly standard, finished in good old PC beige. Not a bad bundle, but I would rather have a copy of Nero in the box than the Pinnacle suite. Samsung sent over the full retail version of the drive which shipped with an IDE cable, an audio cable, mounting screws, a quick setup guide, and a copy of Pinnacle Instand CD/DVD 8. This is a bit of a shame, especially since 6x DVD-RW and 6x DVD-R DL media is now available. I had hoped that a new firmware flash would upgrade the TS-H552, but after downloading the latest firmware and installing it, the specifications stayed resolutely the same as before.

While both the NEC and Plextor PX-716A could also write to DVD-R Dual Layer media as well. Most new drives are offering support for faster DVD+RW and DVD-RW writing, as the NEC ND-3540A showed. The CD-RW performance was reported correctly, and the drive just blazed through the format and the 600MB burn.īut despite the undeniably impressive performance shown by the TS-H552, I have to say that I am a little disappointed that the specifications are as conservative as they are. What was surprising is that Nero reported the CD-R performance to be only 40x, despite the 48x specification, but looking at the results the drive was clearly writing at the faster rate. If you’re still burning a lot of CD media, you’re going to love this drive, with every test whether on CD-R or CD-RW media coming in under three minutes. But to be fair the NEC is a 6x DVD-RW drive while the Samsung is only rated at a more conservative 4x. The DVD-RW times were consistently good, with only the NEC ND-3540A putting the Samsung in the shade. DVD+R performance wasn’t quite so impressive, but it was still consistently good and up there with the best of the competition. Every single result that the Samsung turned in was below six minutes, undercutting the competition by a significant margin. Next there’s the DVD-R tests, and here the TS-H552 just flew. Here the Samsung turned in some pretty respectable times, but not quite as fast as the Toshiba SDR-5372 which was also rated at 5x. Let’s look at the DVD+R Dual Layer performance first.

There aren’t really any outstanding performances in evidence across all the tests, but what you can see from the graphs is that the TS-H552 turned in consistently good times across the board, whereas many drives I test tend to excel with some media and fall behind with other formats. And that really sums up this drive from Samsung – solid.

Samsung word writer