08 February 2013

The strangest thing happened this evening.

My wife’s best friend is visiting and we’re watching The Daily Show and the Colbert Report on the Xbox using Hulu Plus – catching up on our backlog of funny.

All of a sudden the TV goes blank, and then a picture appears on the screen. A picture from the friend’s phone.

WTF!?!

So we stopped watching the shows and figured out what was going on (sort of).

She has a Samsung phone – one of the ones that is a “rip off” of the iPhone, so it is a pretty nice smart phone. And her phone is on our wifi.

When looking at a picture on her phone there’s a button at the top of the screen that, when tapped, sends the photo to the Xbox. It literally takes over the Xbox and shows the picture. And you can pan through pictures on the phone and they each appear on the Xbox (TV) – the images streaming from the phone to the Xbox.

On one hand this is pretty cool, and I wonder why my Windows Phone can’t do this?

On the other hand, it is a little scary to think that she was just playing around with her phone and was able (albeit accidentally) to hijack my Xbox.

Talk about a connected world!