Turning the iPhone into a Home Remote

Zilog's Crimzon Connect system will allow Web-enabled mobile devices like the iPhone or BlackBerry Curve to control an entire home from anywhere.

You can already use your iPhone or BlackBerry to tap out e-mails, surf the Web, and listen to music on the go, but pretty soon, you just may be closing the garage door, turning down the lights in your living room, and firing up the DVD player with them as well. The new Crimson Connect system from Zilog will allow certain mobile phones to act as home remote controls by hooking into existing home automation systems.

The system basically acts as an in-between to connect common mobile consumer devices with common home-control systems, giving Web-enabled convergence devices one more major function. For instance, it will run on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or BlackBerry Curve, and send out control signals to IR, RF, Z-Wave, or X10 devices.

“Crimzon Connects allows you to control on site or remotely virtually any device in and around the home or office via a device you already have such as a laptop PC or a browser-based smart phone such as Apple’s iPhone,” said Michelle Leyden Li, general manager of Zilog’s home control segment, in a statement. “It marries diverse appliances and devices into a seamless, unified home-office control environment accessible through a simple user interface anytime, anywhere in the world.”

Although development kits for the system are circulating now, it won’t be widely available until Zilog launches the first commercially available versions in fall of 2008.