Today, Apple updated its iOS Remote application to version 2.0. The free Remote app is now optimized for the iPad?s larger display and supports streaming from shared libraries over wireless networks with computers running iTunes and the new Apple TV using AirPlay.
But Apple?s vision of using your iPad ? or iPhone ? to play virtual DJ is just one of several competing ways of reinventing the remote control.
Earlier this week at CEDIA 2010, Sony showed off AV Receiver Remote, a similar (and similarly free) iOS universal remote application for its wide range of media appliances. While Apple?s Remote application allows you to queue up music from your library and control speaker volume, Sony?s allows you to do that and more: You can also control room lighting, and stream internet, satellite, or broadcast radio. Christopher MacManus was able to record a hands-on for Sony Insider:
Just as Apple?s remote application leverages its strength in high-end computers and media players, Sony?s app leverages its strength in home theater appliances. Apple can send a movie to your television, but it didn?t make your television (or the receiver your TV might be connected to).
And last week at IFA 2010, Samsung used its new Galaxy Tab to demonstrate its Home Watcher app for Android, which leverages the Korean tech maker?s even more ubiquitous position in home appliances.
As Vivian Kim observes, writing for Apartment Therapy Unpluggd, Samsung?s ?washers and dryers, refrigerators, microwaves, ranges, and home entertainment devices? can allow them to position their phones and tablets not as Apple imitators, but as genuine home automation solutions.
You?ve never had a remote control for your refrigerator before, and maybe you didn?t even know you wanted one. But once it?s within the realm not just of the possible (it always has been, for high-end early-adopters) but reasonably attainable for Samsung?s global middle-class consumer base, something has changed.
How much will we want to do with a single remote when that remote is not an infrared box wrapped around two AA batteries, but a powerful computer with an intuitive interface?
In different ways, that?s the future towards which Apple, Sony, and Samsung are all pointing.
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