First announced at CES, Yahoo!’s widget engine, Connected TV, is now shipping with the Samsung 7000 series LED HDTV, which starts at $2500. The 7000 series Samsung LED HDTVs can either be wired into your home network or connected through a wireless router that costs an extra $80 from Samsung.
The widgets essentially let you surf the Web while you’re catching up on some boob tube. There are shortcut buttons on the TV controller itself and new widgets can be downloaded via the Widget Gallery. Here you can find widgets for Twitter, USA Today Sports, Flickr, Netflix, Amazon, The NYT, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Weather and Yahoo! Finance.
Sony, LG and Vizio will be releasing their own models with the integrated widget engine from Yahoo! in the coming months.