Last weekend I spent yet another night the in the CitizenM hotel at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport.

It's a new chain of super modern budget hotels and I love the concept. The rooms are small but very smart. And equipped with some hot home automation technology.

I would like to share the experiences with you and see what lessons we can learn from it.

The photo shows the pronto remote docked to the wall and next to it the 'low tech' switches for dimming the lights and the blinds.

With the remote you can control basicly anything in your room:

- temperature
- blinds
- lights
- tv

This all works pretty smooth and intuitive. The TV can be controlled in two ways: through the screen interface, which will make the pronto use wifi to connect to the controller which will then control the TV. The other way is through the build in IR of the remote. In that case the screen of the remote is not even on, you use the keypad on the right.

This is a feature that was not enabled a few weeks ago, but now it is. The reason that it is actually needed is because of the standby feature of the Pronto remote. When watching TV you will have your remote lying next to you until you pick it up to zap or mute. After a few minutes the Pronto will go in standby mode and when you pick it up it needs to reconnect to the controller. This takes quite a while.

So long actually that you can't use it as a remote without getting annoyed. So this is where the build in IR comes in handy. But it doesn't feel right, because the IR only supports a subset of the commands.
I think the moral of the story is that for the Openremote iPhone/iPodtouch version it's very critical to look at the reconnect times. It's a good thing they seems to be very responsive in getting the wifi connection backup from standby, in my experience.
Soon enough we will be able to test this in the wild!

JL