If you put that iPhone to work, it may actually pay for itself. Not literally, of course, and not with stuff like the I Am Rich app. 

Instead, Convergent Living allows you to transform that portable into a yet another way to access your home control system.

“We continue to preach the benefits of the user experience and thanks to iPhone’s ease of navigation, exciting color-saturated graphics and Companion’s user-consistent Adobe Flash GUIs, we can deliver on the oft-ignored premise that the user experience is paramount and not the plethora of gadgets,” says Craig Slawson, Convergent’s head. “Companion smartscreens and now the iPhone deliver unparalleled ease of use and wide-area-network (WAN) mobility for accessing and managing all home systems from a single interface or location. Very cool.”

Aside from the iPhone, you will need either a Companion SideKick controller or one of the company’s new LED backlit NEO8, 10 or 15 smartscreens, as well as router port forwarding.

Rachel Cericola - Contributing Writer

Over the past 15 years, Rachel Cericola has covered entertainment, web and technology trends. Check her out at www.rachelcericola.com.