My Blackberry Turned on my TV

I am a big fan of my Blackberry and use it for many things from email (the original function) to phone calls to listening to music via the Pandora app. Recently I stumbled across a new use for the Blackberry, as a universal remote. A company called Unify4Life has a piece of software for your Blackberry that takes advantage of the bluetooth capabilities in the Blackberry to talk to a piece of $99 hardware they call the AV Shadow that then talks to your AV equipment via IR.

The software utilizes a web database to get the proper codes for your AV equipment and allows you to create activities (like Watch TV) that can turn on the appropriate pieces of AV equipment (TV, cable box, home theater, etc.) in what appears to be similar to Logitech's Harmony universal remotes.

Of course there are a number of questions about this such as can the Blackberry coexist with a true universal remote or does the person with the Blackberry control things when they are around (what happens when they are not)?

The Harmony works very well and has spent years working on their software and form factors, how will Unify4Life work outside of the slick YouTube video?

In addition to controlling AV equipment it can also control lights and even your garage door.

Of course adding one more function to my Blackberry just makes it worse when something happens to my Blackberry, but we will leave the single point of failure story for another day. Need to do some more research on the product and check on the "play" budget to see if we can do some hands on research with it.

For now enjoy their video ...