Tablets in Home Automation

The trailblazing iPad from Apple carved a brand new segment out of the computing technology market, creating the web enabled tablet market. Like the 'pad' computer originally depicted in the original Star Trek series and subsequent movies and other similar SciFi roots, the iPad allowed people to have a useful, easy to use computing tool in their hand that could run specific applications for almost an unlimited range of functions in a portable way. It was a revolution to move away from a desk bound device that relied on a mouse and keyboard.

The early Android era Archos 70i tablet

After the iPad came other tablets in all shapes and sizes from a myriad of vendors, but these gained little early traction in the market until Google provided a unifying force for these vendors by providing an open source operating system, Google Android. This was adopted by the vast majority of vendors eager to compete with Apple and allowed standardisation of applications development so apps could be written for many vendor hardware systems simultaneously. This was the jab in the arm required to allow low cost tablets with a good range of quality, price and features to be released into the market. Android powered devices worldwide now number more than one billion.

These new tablet devices initially removed themselves from the continual bigger, better, faster, more features at all costs mentality of their desktop predescessors and had features cut down to allow a smaller more user friendly form factor. This form factor makes them excel as internet appliances for browsing and accessing the web, running 'Apps' that support a multitude of useful tasks and functions, and champions their use in the Smart Home entertainment, home automation and multi-function remote control markets. Many major vendors of PC technology equipment have been surprised and blind-sided by the evolution of the tablet.

Apple iPad running an early Clipsal C-bus home theatre app

Before tablets, Touch screen computers had been around for many years and had many task specific uses, but tablets were a new entrant that redefined what people did with their computing resources and allowed a touch screen computer you could carry with you. This ended up leading to the smart-phone revolution where every vendor released a phone that had smart computing features like a small tablet computer.

Samsung Galaxy Tab

At Nous House we provide the outstandingly functional, premium quality tablets from Archos and support our home automation applications equally on iPad, iPhone, Android Phone or Android Tablet.

If you are interested in using a tablet for Smart House home automation or remote control applications, you are probably best first ensuring that the equipment you are trying to run has applications that are well supported by your preferred device. For instance, Clipsal Wiser can be controlled from any web browser, but does have a specific application with added functionality that plugs into Apple iPad, Apple iPhone, Apple iPad Mini or Android based tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy or Archos, but not Windows 10 based tablets.

At Nous House we provide home automation systems and applications that run on iPad, iPhone, Android Phone or Android Tablet.

See also -

Wireless Routers / WiFi Gateways / WiFi Access Points     

E&OE. This article is general opinion only and may contain inaccuracies or errors and therefore should not be relied upon by the reader for any particular purpose.

If you would like to talk about the information in this article or would like to discuss home automation using iPad, iPhone, Android Phone, Android Tablet or Windows Surface tablets, please contact [email protected]

article updated Jan 2016