I have a Cingular 8125 PDA cellphone that I got primarily for work purposes, but secondarily to control/monitor the house while I'm away. Had some RAGING success yesterday, chalk this ability up as a fact.
Wife & I had a last minute out-of-town trip to Napa Valley as wife's folks were willing to watch kids. I already had Security & HVAC control setup via the PDA [monitor motion sensors, check security system, adjust HVAC while we're not in the house]. I added some A/V screens so I could control the A/V equipment and start DVDs, as they constantly struggle with anything remotely technical, especially if they're trying to watch the kids at the same time.
Here's the latest set of interfaces I made for it, had some pretty good luck with them. That said, I'm going to create a high-bandwidth set and low-bandwidth set and create a new top-level menu having you pick one or the other, as I only got 5-10kbps over Cingular's EDGE network while in Napa yesterday, and some of these are nearly 200K. They were fine from the coffee shops with free wifi, but about 40 seconds per page load time from the movie theater. I kicked off a DVD for the inlaws so they didn't have to deal with anything other than turning TV on. Considering that I won't use this that often, 20 seconds is "ok", but i'd like to see if I can at least create security ones that load within 5-7 seconds.
Obviously these need some serious GUI work - the napa trip was a total last minute thing, so the A/V ones are what I whipped together in