Smart Home Blog

iPhone is very popular in home automation area. Many well-known smarthome producers released their interfaces for Apple’s smartphone - Crestron, mControl, Lagotek, SpeakerCraft etc. Slovenian manufacturer Gorenje also found iPhone attractive and announced a new line of its home appliance controlled via TCP/IP. For all iPhone/iPod Touch owners the company offers a nice looking web interface. So, consumers will be able to set cooking times or laundry cycles from anywhere. What you need is an Internet connection, iPhone and WiFi hotspot.

Sure, the Gorenje web interface will work with any device with web browser - PC, Internet tablet or smartphone. If you don’t have iPhone you can use them instead.

[via 9to5Mac]

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Panasonic announced a new concept of its remote control - EZ Touch Remote. It doesn’t look like any other remote control. The idea is do not have any hard key or virtual button on the device itself. Instead of that all information is displayed directly on the controlled TV. The EZ Touch Remote has two touch pads which allow multitouch data entry and zoom manipulation.

The EZ Touch Remote doesn’t look handy for me. Not sure that Panasonic’s approach is better then usual remote controls with hard keys or touchscreen. In any case let’s see how fast EZ Touch Remote will be available for consumers and what they will tell about it.

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The latest Logitech product Squeezebox Boom has been reviewed recently. Briefly it’s good and it pays for itself. It didn’t spark a revolution in the internet-capable device area but definitely Squeezebox Boom set a new benchmark in the market.

I liked Sqeezebox (but not its remote control) when I got it for testing a couple years ago. And like very much Squeezebox Boom and maybe will buy it some day.

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MCEGuru is a software for Windows Media Center users which allows to control it from several touchscreen devices. One of those device can be Nokia Internet Tablet - Nokia770, N800 or N810. Once installed on the device and MCE the MCEGuru gives you following options:

• See your photos
• List your movies and videos, with their thumbnail image
• List TV channels configured on your Media Center, as well as the program guide for them
• List all the music available on your Media Center, and even listening to it directly on your controlling device
• Manage current playlist on your Media Center
• Control the currently playing media on your TV, browse in it, etc…

To install MCEGuru on your Internet Tablet use that direct link or check the project page on Maemo site.

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NetBlender is planning to integrate iPhone/iPod Touch with BD-Live Blu-Ray players. The new technology is named BD Touch. It’ll allow to consumer to use iPhone/iPod Touch as remote control for Blu-ray player as well as receive to the Apple’s device some media content, including advertising (I know that people hate it but what can we do? Producers want make money and DB Touch might give them a good opportunity). iPhone or iPod Touch can use WiFi connection of services offered by AT&T to communicate with the player.

Developers will able to create new BD Touch applications or integrate Blu-ray players into home automation systems using SDK, which is gonna be released as well. So, it seems that Apple’s gadgets became more and more popular and commonly used. I’m not surprised. iPhone offers the best user interface which can be applied in many places.

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