Smart Home Blog

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.

Today I found cool concept of energy consumption monitor. The system includes two parts: hardware devices – Plug-Ends, which can transmit the energy consumption value and software for mobile phone which displays that value as charts or schemes. The Plug-Ends and mobile phone communicate via Bluetooth. On your mobile phone you’ll able to see the current status of each Plug-End and manage it remotely (it should be visible via Bluetooth).

At the first view the system looks great (iPhone makes makes one’s contribution on it :)). It presents data in the very clear format. So, the consumer shouldn’t have problems with it interpretation. But as I know Bluetooth is not so secure protocol as we’d like to have. And its range is quite enough to give possibility to your neighbors to control your electricity sockets. Some secure level should be definitely implemented in the system if it’s not done yet. Will see when the energy consumption monitor will be released.

As you may know KDE4 is gonna be released next week. Developers promise amazing performance and effects. So, here is a brief conception of new LinuxMCE interface suggested by mymatthaus. It looks nice and presentable. Will see what LinuxMCE developers say.

P.S. Good choice of movie for the screen-shot in the year of the Rat 🙂

GE Consumer & Industrial – leader in major appliance, lighting and integrated industrial equipment presented its point of view on a kitchen of the future. It’ll be the interconnected suite of interactive products: Refrigerator which knows what has been placed in the unit and updates an electronic list of all contents, Speedcook Oven which knows all about prepared food from the package, Water System with refinement based on ultraviolet light and so on. You can watch the video with illustrates this concept.