First Look: Accessory-Powered App Turns iPhone Into Universal Remote

Since March, Wired.com has had high hopes for what we call “dongleware” ? iPhone apps that take advantage of special accessories (via Bluetooth or the USB dock connector). We even compiled a wish list for dongleware we’d like to see. One of those items was an accessory that would turn your iPhone into a universal remote to control your living room entertainment center. Imagine our delight when ThinkFlood told us that its iPhone app “RedEye” would do exactly that.

The free app communicates with a $190 base station that acts as an infrared blaster to control other infrared hardware. You plug in the base station, download and launch the iPhone app, sync the base station with your Wi-Fi network, and then you can start adding your living room devices. RedEye contains a database of different types of devices you can control, broken down by brand name. After you select the brand name and type of device, you can test remote codes until you get a working signal to choose and store.

The product is brand new, and understandably it’s a little rough around the edges. The RedEye database didn’t have remote codes for some of my living room gadgets: no code for my Panasonic HDTV and nada for my A/V receiver (an obscure Japanese brand, so I wasn’t surprised). But it did work with my Comcast cable box. Unfortunately even then, the interface was hardly convenient: It looked nothing like my physical Comcast remote; the cable box’s remote menu was a long list of numbers and buttons, so I would have to swipe all the way up just to tap “1,” for example, then swipe all the way down to tap “Enter.” It also lacked a Guide button to load the program directory.

But those are just my early impressions of RedEye, and consumers should keep this product on their radar. A project like this ? creating a piece of hardware in addition to coding an innovative app ? is an enormously challenging task. ThinkFlood’s founder Matthew Eagar said the RedEye database was light on receiver codes due to time constraints, but the company is working on putting together more. Keep in mind that because the hardware is already doing what it promises, all we have to wait for is the software to mature. Give RedEye some time to tweak its UI and add some more remote codes, and there’s potential for a hit product here. I would love to toss that ugly Comcast remote out the window, wouldn’t you?

See a video of RedEye in action above.

Product Page [ThinkFlood]