One remote to rule them all
January 9th 2009 09:13
If your house is anything like mine, you’ll have at least a half dozen remotes hanging around the place. I’ve got one beside me here, for the CD player, but there’s another for a different CD player in the main lounge, as well as a remote for the heat pump.
A second remote for the other heat pump (though the remotes are interchangeable) is in my wife’s sitting room, along with a remote for the DVD player, one for the TV, one for the video player, and one other sundry one whose purpose I can’t recall at the moment.
My daughter who lives upstairs has her own remotes.
My mother used to have a universal remote, but it wasn’t very good. And the problem with universals is that they’re just as easily lost down the back of a couch as any of the other remotes.
Now take this a step further and consider the person building a ‘smart home.’ You thought your problems with remotes were annoying. Consider the smart home owner who has to contend with remotes for the garage door, the lights, the alarms, the home theater seating and a host of other possibilities.
At present all these components might get installed in a new home without being able to talk to each other. Getting out of the house of a morning would become a nightmare, let alone trying to get back in again when you can’t find the remote that controls the security system, and consequently the front door won’t open.
Apparently Nokia are working on a solution to all this. The aim is to be able to control all the smart home features from a mobile phone. (Just don’t drop the phone down the toilet, or the drain, or the back seat of a car.) Web browsers will also have a role to play.
Nokia will set up a control centre based on an open Linux platform. This should let various companies develop their own systems ‘on top’ of the platform, unifying and integrating it at the same time. The aim is to have a seamless system that lets things be added (or subtracted) without difficulty, and without having to figure out where you’ve put the latest remote you’ve just acquired.
A second remote for the other heat pump (though the remotes are interchangeable) is in my wife’s sitting room, along with a remote for the DVD player, one for the TV, one for the video player, and one other sundry one whose purpose I can’t recall at the moment.
My daughter who lives upstairs has her own remotes.
My mother used to have a universal remote, but it wasn’t very good. And the problem with universals is that they’re just as easily lost down the back of a couch as any of the other remotes.
Now take this a step further and consider the person building a ‘smart home.’ You thought your problems with remotes were annoying. Consider the smart home owner who has to contend with remotes for the garage door, the lights, the alarms, the home theater seating and a host of other possibilities.
At present all these components might get installed in a new home without being able to talk to each other. Getting out of the house of a morning would become a nightmare, let alone trying to get back in again when you can’t find the remote that controls the security system, and consequently the front door won’t open.
Apparently Nokia are working on a solution to all this. The aim is to be able to control all the smart home features from a mobile phone. (Just don’t drop the phone down the toilet, or the drain, or the back seat of a car.) Web browsers will also have a role to play.
Nokia will set up a control centre based on an open Linux platform. This should let various companies develop their own systems ‘on top’ of the platform, unifying and integrating it at the same time. The aim is to have a seamless system that lets things be added (or subtracted) without difficulty, and without having to figure out where you’ve put the latest remote you’ve just acquired.
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