Saturday, March 16, 2013

Time to dump the remote controls

remote control pig pile by redjar, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License  by redjar

Every electronic device you buy for your home comes complete with its very own remote control. My home is full of them, some used every day whereas others are hidden away and forgotten. We've even got a few so-called universal remote controls that are supposed to replace all the others but we've never really figured out how. So there are still four controls on the coffee table and we're still waiting for the solution to the problem.

So I was pleased to read an article on Digital Trends called Why mobile devices spell certain death for the universal remote control. The future belongs to mobiles and tablet and it only makes sense to use them to control our household gadgets via a smart app. One mobile device for everything seems the way to go.

"In the modern world, apps have supplanted dedicated devices. Why own five products with five different purposes when you could own one product with five million purposes? Connected mobile devices with app functionality have forced plenty of competitors into obsolescence and the universal remote will soon lie somewhere on that laundry list."

Can't come soon enough for me.

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