At a stage in the middle of Samsung's gigantic CES booth, the company showed off the latest updates to its AllShare technology. The big star of the show was AllShare Play, a DLNA-powered service that lets you beam your media across devices running Samsung's AllShare software. In Samsung's demo, we were able to access files on a laptop running AllShare software through a Galaxy Note; we could play video directly on the device, but we were also able to beam it Airplay-style to a Wi-Fi-enabled TV that was on the same local wireless network as the Galaxy Note.

The big update is that you can access files from anywhere, not just when you're on a local network — so if you have a home computer you can leave running at all times, you can access your media anywhere from your laptop or smartphone. Any computer should be able to serve up media as long as the AllShare software is installed, and the corresponding app should be available in the Android Market for handsets running Android 2.2 and up.

We also saw a few more examples of AllShare Control, a service that lets you use your phone or tablet as a remote to control devices hooked up to the same Wi-Fi network. In addition to the Wi-Fi washing machine, we also saw a Roomba-style vacuum and a Wi-Fi digital camera. The digital camera functionality was particularly nice -- you could use your Android phone as a live viewer, provided both devices were on the same network. There's even an update to the iOS Samsung Remote app coming, but the company didn't have any more details on what features it would support. Given the prominence of AllShare in Samsung's booth, we're expecting to hear a lot more about this technology over the next year.