Your Mobile Becomes a Household On/Off Switch

You don’t need to be home to control the electrical devices in your house—not if you have the right Web interface from NTT-Neomeit.

The software set enables you to control, using your mobile phone, just about anything you have plugged in at home. Press a certain number of buttons on the phone (assuming it’s Web-enabled) and you can send a message to your home wireless router, which transfers the instructions to the various gadgets that you want to turn on and off just to amaze your friends. Among the uses will be setting up the TV recorder to cover your lapses in memory.

The first glimpses of this will be next month, when it goes beta. Expect to see a full version under way this fall, with a monthly cost of US$4. Remember, though, it’s NTT, so it’s Japan. Some Western customers can do some of this now, especially modifying their satellite TV recording schedules. Full electrical functionality would be new, though.