You’ve seen the Quirky Pivot Power strip, haven’t you? It’s the one that has pivoting outlets that allow power plugs and those giant AC adapters fit better, so that you don’t lose some of the outlets because of chunky adapters. Well, the Pivot Power Genius takes this flexible strip one better. It still bends to accommodate big adapters, it still has built-in surge protection, and it still has four outlets. It now has an app that controls two of the four outlets from your smartphone. You can turn those two outlets on or off remotely or schedule them to activate at a specific time. The Quirky Pivot Power Genius is $60 at The Gadget Flow.
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Ok first things first. This caught my eye because I want to setup a remote ham radio relay 300 miles from my house. I want a way to kill power to it remotely and most of the remote power vars are in the $200-$500 range. I wanted to see if it’s web-enabled, or requires iPhone.
No info on sale site, so I went to the manufactures website. This is where I got pissed off and just walked away. While ATTEMPTING to browse the site, the site page grey out and a big blue “SUBSCRIBE NOW” screen covers everything I’m trying to look at. I click NO, next page I click on their site BOOM “SUBSCRIBE NOW” once again blocking everything I’m reading. NO this continues. After about 6 tries to find the item on the website I got frustrated and just closed it.
Although the products look interesting, Pestering me to subscribe to your site/newsletter with annoying popup screens says to me that you are more interested in data mining me, than providing me with a quality product.
@Andrew Baker – It has a Android/iOS app and can connect over WiFi but there’s nothing indicating whether the app will work remotely and it’s pretty basic… Like the timer option only sets time but won’t give you option for days of the week, etc.
The “Belkin WeMo Switch” is probably what you’re looking for… it uses mobile internet to control your home electronics right from your smartphone or tablet. So it’s available for both Android and iOS devices…
Though, each one only provides a single socket but it’s extremely flexible and individually they’re only about $50-$60… Versus $60 to $79 for the Quirky Pivot Power Genius, which only provides two controllable sockets out of the 4 and is far less flexible…
The WeMo InSight Switch will even keep track of how much power the connected device/appliance is using and let you keep track of it remotely… While the WeMo Switch can be coupled with a motion sensor and they even got a Crock-Pot slow cooker that’ll let you remote cook from anywhere, just to give an idea of how flexible this system is…
A big problem (for me) is that there is only one app to control this and the app (Wink) requires you to have an internet account which you must be logged into in order to operate it. I do not like the privacy problems this raises and the fact that there is no backup should Wink cease business.