Living Smarter
Use the awesome Flic smart button to hook into all of your home entertainment kit
We love making your life easier. This month, we show you how to use smart buttons to control your media player
One look at the dinky Flic should be enough to convince you of its charms. The £ 25 silicon- covered Bluetooth button is small and tactile, and its app offers up a host of controls. You can map three of them to a single button, based on whether you press it once, twice, or hold it in. It could do anything from triggering silly sounds to making a fake call to your phone – perfect for escaping awkward social situations with a pocket press.
The Flic’s portability, and the fact that you can mash it anywhere, means it’s a pretty perfect remote control; as long as it’s within range of your phone, and your phone is hooked up to a network, you can configure it to pipe three distinct commands into excellent everythingplayer VLC (see right), or use the Change Config action in conjunction with Flic’s built-in action chains to enable more.
There’s also a Chromecast function, if that’s your current preferred method of streaming, and there are plenty of media options beyond that. Why not use a Flic to pause, play and skip music tracks, perfect for use in the shower (thanks, silicon water resistance) or while piping your music into your car? Or take advantage of the Flic app’s hooks to Spotify, Deezer, and Bose and Sonos wireless speakers for more direct control?
The Flic button can be used to control your TV and music streaming
It’s even able to talk directly to certain TVs as long as they’re either running Android TV or LG’s WebOS, and there’s a connection to Logitech’s Harmony Remote for more specific commands. That said, if the Harmony is core to your home entertainment setup, you’ll get a slightly better experience if you opt for a Logitech Pop rather than a Flic.