Friday, June 09, 2006

The Cell Phone...A Universal Remote Control

The majority of my posts discuss the ability to retrieve information from physical objects from camera phones using physical world hyperlinks.

Another function for your "universal remote control", will be the ability for a cell phone to operate and interact with the "Internet of Things". One of the ways will be using Zigbee technology.

The ZigBee standard which offers the mass production promises of adding a radio to anything for less than one dollar in the next few years.

This is called Phase 2 of the Internet, it will dwarf Phase 1 (email, surfing).


Freescale is targeting for future Zigbee products is the consumer cell phone market, with an eye to providing home owners with the ability to control various home automation functions as easily as they would call in a pizza order.

Zigbee in cell phones is part of a larger evolution of the IEEE standard for industrial and home automation.

The next generation of Zigbee, which is a wireless peer-to-peer mesh network protocol, will more deeply penetrate the residential space. So why not use a common device such as a cell phone to control the network.

“The remote controls that you use in the home will transition from infrared to RF,” said Brett Black, commercial wireless operations manager at Freescale. “RF offers two-way acknowledgement.

There are some exciting companies that are working on making Phase 2 happen.

2 comments:

Dean Collins said...

Thats just plain dumb, no need to add zigbee into the phone (1/ it takes both physical and power weight out of other potential capabilities 2/ it's just not required).

Far more intelligent solution is to have your zigbee home/office appliance/applications network aware and then have a network capable phone that can interface into this via an application (or browser).

Putting another radio into the handset (even low powered like zigbee) just isn't necessary.

If you look at the new www.Savaje.com OS phone handsets you will see that this is exactly the type of application you can code up today in Java J2SE.

Why wait :)

Cheers,
Dean
www.Cognation.net
www.Mexuar.com

Anonymous said...

Shutup bapí your a bendahó. Chú dont know what chú are talkingka bout