You probably don’t know it, but you can use your smartphone as a remote control to control your television or any other audio-video device. A little-known function that can be useful to you on a daily basis.
Sitting comfortably on your couch in front of the TV, you decide to change the channel. Except that the remote control no longer gives any sign of life. Its batteries are flat. And, after having searched the whole house for replacement batteries, in vain, you find yourself scrutinizing all the edges of your television in order to find control buttons. Good luck: most recent models don’t have one! However, you still have some hope of regaining control over your TV thanks to… your smartphone. It can control your television, but also your DVD player, your TV box, your home cinema amplifier and many audio-video devices. And you can use it on a daily basis as a universal remote control to control all your devices, without having to look for the zapette hidden under a cushion.
For a long time, several smartphone brands have offered models equipped with an infrared port. A technology, certainly old, but still frequently used on electronic audio and video devices in the living room. This is for example the case of Xiaomi, Poco (one of Xiaomi’s brands), Honor, Huawei, OnePlus, Vivo, Nubia and even Oppo. Some manufacturers like Samsung have unfortunately abandoned this device. To find out if your smartphone has an infrared port (also simply called IR), look carefully at its upper edge. If an infrared port is present, it appears in the form of a punch covered with a more or less shiny black coating.
Thus equipped, the smartphone is fully capable of replacing the faulty infrared remote control of your device. On Xiaomi and Poco mobiles for example, a dedicated app, called Mi Remote Control, is installed by default. It draws up a list of many brands of audio and video equipment classified by category. After defining the type of device and the brand, it only takes a few seconds for it to be identified by carrying out several tests by pressing the virtual start button on the mobile screen. You then have the basic controls to control your TV or amplifier. Practical.
However, not all smartphones – starting with iPhones – have an infrared port. But if your television is fairly recent, in particular if it is a Smart TV connected to the home network (via Wi-Fi or Ethernet), it is still possible to control it using your smartphone using radio waves, more effective than infrared. Start by checking on the Internet if the TV manufacturer offers an app (this is very often the case). It will allow you to take control of it, after having associated it with your smartphone through the Wi-Fi network.
If your TV manufacturer doesn’t offer a dedicated app, there are many free universal remote apps for iOS and Android. One of the most popular is Anymote, but it’s full of ads, which can be annoying in the long run. We prefer other apps like Universal TV Remote (from Hichhike Tech) on Android and EZRemote Lite (from Zheng Fang) on iOS. With these tools, each member of the household can use their phone as a universal remote control: no need to fight over who has the zapette!