Over the past few weeks, I've been taking a look at how Samsung has made the Galaxy S4 better than the SIII. Quite a few of the features they've been shouting about are software-based and a rumoured to be coming to an S3 near you in future updates.
Several of the new gizmos are built-in though. There are some pretty wizzy camera tricks I'll try and cover off next week, but I discovered one of the coolest things about this new phone almost by accident.
As well as being the smartest phone on the block, the Galaxy S4 is now your new Universal Remote Control.
I am old. I know this because I can clearly remember a time BEFORE remote controls. In fact, I recall the first VCR my parents ever owned. It was cutting edge because it came WITH an actual remote. Admittedly, it wasn't a wireless remote... it was connected to the video recorder by a very long lead. (No, I'm not making this up) You could play, stop, rewind, fast-forward and possibly even record. Obviously if you wanted to do anything as complicated as set the timer you'd have to do it on the actual machine, but what do you expect?
Of course, in order to do that timer recording thing, you'd have to stop the clock flashing, "00:00" - nobody's ever worked out how to do that, so no point in putting it on a remote, right?
Needless to say, things have progressed somewhat since then.
Now you can control EVERYTHING by remote - from the telly right through to the lights and the heater. Even just watching my favourite shows now involves up to 3 different clickers; home theatre for the sound, TV for the pics and SKY for dialing up the actual show. That's a lot of buttons on a lot of remotes all taking up a lot of coffee tabletop.
Enter, the universal remote. These come in all shapes and sizes - there are universal remotes that look like remotes, then there are models that operate more like a small tablet giving you complete control over your whole house, your beach house and possibly the U.S.S. Enterprise.
The price of these varies wildly too, but it's hard to find a half decent one for much under a hundred bucks. So is it worth handing over a hundie to free up your sofa arms? Possibly not. But if the universal remote was already built into your phone, it'd be silly not to use it.
The S4 comes with something called the IR Blaster, a piece of hardware you can now find in several of the new Samsung devices. On the S4, you run it with an app called WatchOn which will guide you through a reasonably straight-forward setup process to get your phone talking to your other gadgets.
The really cool thing is, you can set up different rooms. Hell, I even took it to work and started changing channels there. Primarily just to annoy people who couldn't figure out why their remote had stopped working properly. Good times.
If I have a criticism of what really is a very straight-forward device, it'd be some difficulties I had figuring out which option to use to recognise my MySky decoder. You select devices by manufacturer and it took some fairly intensive Googling to discover Sky's set-top boxes are in fact manufactured by Pace. Once I had discovered this, I could access most of the Sky remote's functions bu not all. I can't rule out operator-error here, of course, but given I would have thought this was a reasonably common machine for New Zealanders to want to control, the WatchOn people may want to have a look at making the kiwi MySky options a bit more accessible.
Other than that, how cool is it to have a universal remote that doesn't take up any table space at all, because it's in your phone? Or your Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet - but that's a whole other story. Or at least another blog.
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