First Galaxy Home, now Ballie, can Samsung stop selling a future it can't deliver?

Samsung Electronics makes a lot of products. Its portfolio includes everything from smartphones to smart rings, XR headsets, home appliances, TVs, gaming monitors, notebooks, and a lot more. So would you hold it against the company if a product that it announces with much fanfare never ends up seeing the light of day?

On the contrary, why shouldn't you? Samsung isn't some mom and pop cottage industry operating out of a garage with limited resources. It's one of the world's largest conglomerates, and Samsung Electronics is just one of its many subsidiaries that manufacture a diverse range of items from medicines to batteries and even military equipment. When you operate at such a high level, it's unacceptable for things to fall through the cracks.

Yet, that's precisely what has happened with Ballie, a rolling robot that was meant to follow you around the home. Samsung unveiled the original prototype way back in CES 2020. The company had said at that time that the robot would be released in the future. We didn't hear much about the robot for the next few years and it felt like Samsung just forgot about it.

Only that it didn't. Samsung once again made a big song and dance for Ballie at CES 2024. The robot had been redesigned, become more capable, and had even had a built-in projector. It looked far more finished than the prototype unveiled back in 2020. Samsung said that it would reveal more information about availability soon.

Only that it didn't. 2024 ended, 2025 came and ended. What never came was a firm launch date and an exact price for this robot. That's despite the fact that Samsung had earlier committed to releasing Ballie in South Korea and the United States by summer 2025. Some of the truly faithful would have held out on hope that Samsung will surely have more details to share about Ballie at CES 2026.

In what's clearly become a trend, only that it didn't. CES 2026 came and went without any word on what's happened with Ballie. It was missing from the show entirely, as if the robot never existed. One can't help but feel bad on behalf of that cute little robot.

People naturally had questions, and Samsung appears to have brushed the issue of Ballie's release under the carpet. It has now referred to the robot as an “active innovation platform,” subtly implying that its quietly headed for cancellation, despite earlier promises that it would be released.

It would not be so bad had this been the first time Samsung did something like this. Some of you may remember the Galaxy Home announced back in 2018. This Bixby-powered smart speaker was meant to rival the Siri-equipped HomePod from Apple.

2018 was a different time. Samsung was actively pitching Bixby as a Siri competitor across its mobile platform, but a lot has changed since then, and first Google Assistant and now Gemini have all but taken the reins.

Samsung also strung everyone along for the Galaxy Home. It didn't come out in 2018 or 2019, despite repeated assurances from the company that it will hit the market soon. Then came 2020 and the world changed but as everything opened up in 2021, Samsung gave an answer as vague as it has now done for Ballie, that wasn't an outright confirmation of its demise or wasn't fooling anyone either.

It did, however, launch a Galaxy Home mini which wasn't nearly as capable as the Galaxy Home was said to be. Samsung initially only gave it as a pre-order incentive for Galaxy S20 customers and that too only in South Korea. This smart speaker never got a wider release and just faded into oblivion.

In less than a decade, we've seen the company hype up two products repeatedly only to leave us all high and dry. It's hard to imagine that it only dawned on Samsung four years after unveiling the Galaxy Home that it wouldn't work as a commercial product, or six years after first showing off Ballie that the market for personal robots just isn't mature enough.

Experimenting with new product ideas is fine and shelving products is fine, too. Hyping them up as consumer products to be launched soon only to quietly bury them isn't. When a company as influential as Samsung does this, it stops being quirky or charming and starts being a trust issue. Trust, unlike prototypes, isn't something you can quietly bury and hope people forget.