Every smart home must have a smart remote, and there’s a new company on crowd funding site Kickstarter that says the smartphone isn’t the best choice for that purpose. NEEO is a clever device that comes with a remote control and a ‘brain’ to keep control of your home centralised, this includes your home theatre kit and all of your connected gadgets like the Nest and Philips Hue.
Based in Cupertino, NEEO boasts a co-founding team that combined has over 25 years of experience in the home automation industry between them. CEO Raphael Oberholzer is an electronics genius who previously worked at Bang & Olufsen and Swiss firm Smart Home SA which specialises in the installation of high end smart home systems.
Key Features of the NEEO Remote
The NEEO has hand recognition and also a battery life that extends to several months without the need to recharge. The locator feature beeps as soon as you activate it via an app on your smart phone, and it also supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 6LowPAN, ZigBee, Z-Wave and Thread right out of the box.
It has IR blasters built into the hub cover which have a 360-degree range. It has a learning mode for teaching it the IR codes of any gadget it does not already support.
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Possibly NEEO’s greatest feature is that it is designed to anticipate your requirements, the hand recognition technology provides you with your playlists, favourites and other content on a 3.2-inch touch screen by identifying factors in your palm. It will support numerous profiles and provide a guest mode for hands it does not recognise. There is even an app to accompany it that you can use on your smartphone alongside the dedicated hardware.
The NEEO is delivered with a database of 30,000 gadgets preloaded in its library for super-simple setup and Kickstarters early bird backers can buy one today for just $148.
The team is planning delivery of Kickstarter units in varying batches, with the earliest being this April. This is an ambitious target but fully functional prototypes have been produced, and the point of the crowdfunding is primarily to make the final jump to full-scale production.
Fully dedicated smart remotes undoubtedly fall behind their software competition in some aspects, however, smartphone apps aren’t a great solution on their own either. NEEO looks to be a very promising device so hopefully, they can live up to the potential.
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