BlackBerry Tour 9630 - Related phones
For smart devices that don’t use a bridge, such as LIFX bulbs, each device has to be added independently, which is a bit of a pain. Once devices have been discovered, they can be grouped into rooms and your Favourite devices appear both on the Home screen of the Home App and in iOS Control Centre. If you’d like to remote control your devices, you need a compatible fixed product at home that remains connected to your home network. This can be an Apple TV, an iPad that’s left plugged in or, more recently, a HomePod. Cleverly, any hub can be used to remote control any compatible Bluetooth devices.
If you’ve got a Bluetooth smart lock, for example, you can control it from anywhere in the world, provided the device is within range of one of your HomeKit hubs. Apple Home and HomeKit – Device control Both iOS and macOS Home apps are laid out in a similar way, so it’s easy to jump between the two. All devices fit into uniform icons in the Home app, with little icons to let you know what the type of device is, such as a light bulb. The icons aren’t quite up to the usual standard of Apple products and are a little basic.
BlackBerry Tour 9630 - Related phones - Standards For Practical accessories for smartphones Systems
If you have room names that are too long, Home can truncate them on the icon, which looks a little ugly: ‘Default Ro…’ for example, rather than ‘Default Room’. Some devices appear in the app that you can’t do anything with, such as the Apple TV and the Philips Hue Hub. These can clutter up the app, so I recommend putting them into one room out of the way. The HomePod smart speaker is managed through the Home App and tapping the icon will play/pause the last music selection. For devices that you can control, the options differ by device type. With light bulbs, tapping or clicking the icon turns the light on or off. On iOS, a long press brings up a slider to adjust brightness or, depending on the bulb type, adjust colour and temperature.
BlackBerry Tour 9630 - Related phones - Comparing Significant Criteria In mobile phones
For macOS, getting the brightness control needs a right-click to select the Show Control option. It would have been nice if Apple had implemented Force Click support instead. Thermostats give you a slider to adjust the temperature, although what happens depends on the device. For example, with a Tado Smart Thermostat, adjusting the temperature will put the thermostat into Manual mode.
BlackBerry Tour 9630 - Related phones - The Latest On Speedy Methods In accessories for smartphones
Depending on how you’ve configured Manual Mode in the Tado app the change can be permanent, for a set time or until the next scheduled change. Control, as you can see, isn’t quite as granular here as through the app. There’s no option to turn a room on or off with a single command, so you can’t control a bunch of lights together this way. Instead, you have to create Scenes, which lets you set default settings for lights and other devices. For example, you could have Movie Night, where you dim down the lights and stick up the temperature. It’s trivial to create a Scene that turns everything off, but it would be nice to have this as a default.
Scenes aren’t pulled through from other devices, either. So, if you’ve spent a lot of time making a scene in the Hue app, you can’t trigger it in the Home app and will have to replicate the settings with a HomeKit scene. Having your favourites available from Control Centre is a real bonus, as you can quickly get to your top devices or scenes.
There are some devices that you can’t directly control, but that you can programme, such as the Logitech Pop buttons or Philips Hue Dimmer switches. For the latter, for example, you can set default actions when you press any of the buttons. In this way, you can make the Hue switch do other actions, such as turning up your heating or triggering a scene.
The control isn’t as granular as in the Hue app. With the Philips app you can set what happens on multiple presses of the on button, using it to cycle through your favourite scenes; the dim and off buttons then work as expected. And, be careful, as setting controls in the Home app doesn’t replace the modes set in the Hue app, so you can have unexpected things happening.
No comments:
Post a Comment