To many people, yesterdays announcement from Apple will mean that Cut & Paste, MMS and Turn by Turn GPS is finally making it to the iPhone. Many other improvements are coming too(forward a text message anyone?), but perhaps the most interesting stuff points towards an even bigger role for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the Smart Home...

RSS feeds are a great way to catchup on all your favourite sites.  We recommend Google Reader which makes it fun to trawl your feeds from any comuter or even your phone.  At Automated Home we offer three smart home RSS Feeds which we just moved onto the FeedBurner system.  This gives us better control of our RSS, improved formatting and should also allow us to monitor subscribers better.  Read on for the new URLs and the buttons to add Reader...

AlertMe - the innovative UK based smart home security system based on Zigbee technology - is taking another step forward with the details of v2.0 of their software.  Read on for the summary and link to the demo system...

Idratek announce the release of Cortex V24 - As well as the usual multitude of detailed enhancements this latest version of Cortex has been influenced by increasingly large and complex installations of the IDRATEK system. To this end this version includes features to better support installers as well as to improve the user’s management and interface to these larger structures...

As a festive treat, Bye Bye Standby are offering readers of Automated Home a free Energy Saver Starter Kit , with purchases of an Online Controller and 12-Months Premium Subscription. The Online Controller provides secure remote access to your Bye Bye Standby Smart Sockets, allowing you to control your home from anywhere*. The Premium Subscriptions enables additional features such as Scenes and Schedules...

An Automated Home reader has posted a bargain netbook deal on our mailing list this morning.  At under £200 delivered , the Acer Aspire One A150-Aw Netbook is one of the few NetBook with huge storage in the form of a proper 120Gb hard drive.  This makes it useful as a movie player for example, as well as a sofa surfer.  The netbook come with Linpus Linux Lite installed and with its large drive and 1Gig RAM it will easily run Windows XP.  There are also hacks documented how to install OSX on it too...

We've been contacted by Control4 in Australia, who were keen to show us how they've integrated XBMC into their professional home automation system...

"Control4 Australia's XBMC interface allows IP control over the open source XBMC media center. Full control can be accessed via Control4's wireless and wired touchscreens, zigbee remote controls, keypads or Control4's onscreen graphical user interface.  What this means is that you can create a full on demand theatre experience with automated blinds, lights and temperature control and touchscreen movie selection or perhaps a multiroom distributed audio/video system.

Sky's video-on-demand service, Sky Player has just had a make-over.  It now uses Microsoft Silverlight plugin (Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer are all supported) and for the first time will be available with a subscription so users can receive and watch live Sky channels without the need for a satellite dish or receiver.  Just use your PC (some features available to Mac users, but not all) and a broadband internet connection...

Earlier this year, as cellular broadband started to really take off, we put the Vodafone 3G USB Stick to the test.  This quickly became one of our most popular reviews, and its accompanying YouTube video (below) has had many thousand of views.  However, contracts don't suit everyone which is why Vodafone have just announced their PAYG version of this modem.  For a limited time the £49 device is shipping with a free £15 credit, effectively making it just £34...

We've just received a press release from a new European on-line Z-Wave store.  Lets hope this will be a catalylst that will help to kick start the long-awaited expansion of the Z-Wave range of products...