Gmote (
http://www.gmote.org/) is a remote control for your PC. Or rather, it turns your Android phone into one by connecting your phone to your PC over a WiFi connection.
Here’s how it works: You install the free Gmote server on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer and create a password. Next you install the free Gmote app on your Android phone and enter the password. Now you can control audio and video playback, use your phone’s touchscreen like a mouse touchpad, or launch web pages from your phone.
You configure the PC server with a list of folders where you keep your audio and video files. Then you can navigate to those files on your Android phone to start playing media using a custom version of the VLC media player (
http://www.videloan.org/). Videos play in full screen mode by default, while audio plays in the background. Gmote gives you a series of playback buttons that you can press to fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or skip to the next track or video.
Want to watch web video from YouTube, Hulu, or other sites? Just hit the Web button to bring up a list of web sites or enter your own, then hit the Open on computer button to launch the web site in your computer’s default web browser. You can then hit the touchpad button in Gmote to control the mouse cursor on your PC in order to control video playback from those web sites.
Overall, I’m pretty impressed with Gmote. It doesn’t easily let you control third party media players the way that RemoteX for iPhone does. But for a free app, Gmote works quite nicely. There’s also a $2.99 version called Gmote Donate available in the Android Market if you want to help support the developers.
You can check out more screenshots and my hands-on video with Gmote after the break.
