Other than designing smart bulbs and lightstrips that are a bang for your buck, Near also has a Smart Remote that allows you to automate your home appliances such as Air-con, TV and fan. You can also control them with your smartphone or a smart assistant like Google Assistant. The Near Smart Remote retails at S$22.90.
Tech specs
| Product size | ⌀ 67 x 25 mm |
| Weight | 130g |
| Infrared distance | 12m |
| Input current | 500mA |
| Input power | 5V DC1A |
| Wi-Fi support | 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n |
Unboxing
In the box, you will receive the following:
- Near Smart Remote
- Micro-USB cable
- Instruction card
Setup
Getting the Near Smart Remote to connect to your smartphone via the Near app is quite straightforward. Simply long press the button on the underside for about 5 seconds until a LED starts flashing. Ensure that your Wi-Fi on your smartphone is connected to 2.4GHz network, then connect the Smart Remote in the app.
Do I need to be connected to 2.4GHz network in order to control the Smart Remote?
That was my initial worry as I am always using a 5.0GHz network. But I’m glad to say that you not need to be connected to the 2.4GHz network. In fact, as long as your smartphone is connected to the internet (even mobile data), you can control the Smart Remote! You just need the 2.4GHz network for the initial setup.
Connecting to your home appliances
Place the Near Smart Remote within 10 metres and line of sight of the appliances you want the Smart Remote to control. During the setup, you will see that there is a wide variety of appliances that can connect with the Smart Remote.
The Near Smart Remote works by scanning the IR code of your home appliance. Sometimes, the control code of a particular device may differ from the standard code used, which will lead to wrong mapping of controls, or even not work at all.
Near states that most air-conditioners should work with the Smart Remote except Sanyo and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. As my air-con is Sanyo brand, I can’t test the Smart Remote with my air-con. However, I am able to get the Smart Remote to connect with my EuropAce table fan and Samsung TV.
After successful connection to the TV/fan, you will see that there is default set of buttons to control the TV/fan. For my TV, all the controls work as how they intended to be. Meaning ‘Volume + equals to a volume increase’. But on the fan, the ‘Wind Speed Level’ actually turns on timer instead. There is a way to re-map the keys but somehow I couldn’t get it to work.
However, these buttons on the app remote are not that important to me as I do not think I will actually use the app as a remote. Instead, I believe it is way more efficient to set automations or control the TV/fan using Google Assistant or Siri.
App and Smart features
The Near app is packed with many useful and smart features that can make your life much easier. Let’s get into each feature.
Home and Room Management
As there could be many devices you could link up with the Near Smart Remote, this feature allows you categorize each appliance into a particular room or house. This reduces clutter on the main screen on the app, letting you view and control your appliances by rooms so you don’t have scroll through a long list of lights.
However, unlike the Smart Bulb and Smart Strip Light, there is no quick access button to quickly turn on/off the connected device. However, you can set actions for it.
Tap-to-Run sequence
“Tap-to-Run” allows you to create macros and save them as a shortcut, where once you tap on that shortcut, the light will do whatever you specify in your instruction sequence.
In the app, to create a “Tap-to-Run” sequence, you have set the condition to “Click to execute”. After which, you proceed to choose a task to be carried out. Whatever that is displayed on the controls of the appliance in the app can be set as a task. For example, you can set the task to be switching the TV display source to be HDMI-3.
The task that can be carried out are not limited to one appliance. If you have more than one device connected to the app, you can configure the task to do two different things – such as turning on the fan and changing the source of the display of your TV.
On the iPhone, your “Tap-to-Run” sequences will also show up on iPhone widgets if you enable the Near Shortcut Control widget on your home screen. This makes it convenient to activate the action without going into the app.
Integration with Smart Assistants (ie. Google Assistant)
The main benefit of designing “Tap-to-Run” sequences is so that you can activate these actions using smart assistant like Google Assistant. If you’re using an iPhone, the “Tap-to-Run” sequence can be added to Siri Shortcuts. As such, you can run these actions via Siri and with your own customised phrase.
And if you are using Google Assistant, fret not. Google Assistant seems to be able to activate “Tap-to-Run” actions as long as you say “activate [name of action]”. But if you want to greater flexibility in your triggers, you can simply use IFTTT by linking it to Google Assistant and Near Light (Smart Life in IFTTT) to set up an Applet to do so.
Automation
You can also use the Near app to design automated actions. The Automation setup is simply an “If this happens, then do that” setup. For example, you can tell the fan to switch on if the temperature is lower than 30°C, or when you get home from work at around 8.00pm.
The condition can also be based on a device, such as, “if the table light is turned on, then turn on the TV and switch on the fan”.
You can also set the automated action to only run during a specified period of time, for example only during weekdays.
There is a wide variety of automated tasks that you can design, and the permutations of tasks will only increase with more appliance that you connect with the Smart Remote. The benefits of automation will only get more apparent with more devices and even Near lights you own in the Near ecosystem.
Conclusion
The ability to turn on your air-con, fan or TV using your voice or even automatically turning on/off based on time is really awesome. The automaton aspect of the Near Smart Remote is also another big selling point for me. Imagine waking up, and the aircon is already turned off, and when you head to your living room for breakfast, the TV is turned on ready for you to catch up on the morning news. Once you experience something like this, you do not want to go without it.
There is unfortunately no list of compatible products that work with the Near Smart Remote. So therein lies some risk of buying to test if it works for your home appliance. However, for just S$22.90, it is small price to pay to test and making your home much smarter. I’m pretty sure it’ll work with most TVs such as Samsung or LG.
If you already own Google Home device, then the Near Smart Remote will seamlessly integrate into your smart home and offer even more convenience. The Near Smart Remote is easy to use and setup and has a nice and expanding Near ecosystem which I believe will only get better with time.