I am looking at transforming my 2002 smart home into a 2010 smart home. What is a smart home you say? A smart home is a computer controlled home that controls systems such as lighting, security, music, video, temperature and anything else that can be automated.

The perfect smart home:
Multi-room Touchscreen Audio Out(Speakers)/In(Microphone), Video Out(Screen)/In(Camera)
Complete house lighting and dimming control from control panels
Complete Zoned Thermostat control from control panels
Ability to manage from iPhone and Web
Intercom system for front door with auto-lock and auto-open
Blind automation including raising and lowering
Pool and hot tub tempurature/jet/pump control

In detail it would have:
Multi-Camera Monitoring at once with motion detection texting and emailing.
Ability to pipe one rooms mics and video to other rooms in the house - baby monitor mode
Lighting based upon X10 or ZWave wireless controls. The central server will manage it.
Computer speech recognition for house/music/video control plus dictation of notes and email.
Plays different or the same music in each room. The touchpad will give the user the ability to select songs. The microphones will be able to select a song, play it and pause it.
Mutli-room intercom system that talks to other rooms. For example say "talk to office" and it will patch you through to the office.
Ability to schedule scenes:
night - like have ocean sounds playing at night with video of night ocean
morning - have sunrise video, sunrise up-dimming of lights, computer text-to-speech of morning news/emails/notes, voice-alarm throughout house
away - have motion detection lights, thermostat turned to power save
leave - lock door, energy saver mode, alarm system active
home - turns on HVAC an hour before coming home. Sets blinds and lighting to appropriate levels.

Solution: HP Slate computer control panels with integrated webcam/speaker/microphone. If microphone does not pickup well get usb viop speakerphone that has higher quality microphones and speakers.
Centralized server in one room that serves video/audio/cameras to the rest of the slates in the house.

Now back in the day the cost of this would be over $10,000. I think I could get it done for $2000. At first I was like why not use the new iPad for such a task and then I realized that an iPad had limitations. Most of it was hardware limitations. Being an Apple device you can't hook up networked computers via wifi. You can't share music with other computers in the house. You can't run any kind web server on an iPad. According to the news the year of the Tablet PC is upon us. My guess is they will all be around $500 which is great considering that technology was just around $2000 just last year. HP has announced a new Slate Computer which should come out in the summer to compete with the iPad. The time has come for multi-computer houses to be common with purposes for each computer. We are now free of the bounds of the "Desk" and the "Lap". We are free from wires. I shall definitely wait on buying all of that as prices are just going to keep going down. It makes me think though I could create a software company that manages home networks as I see it as a void that needs to be filled. I've got the experience with network managment software and I can see the possibilities. I even have the name and the domain name from an idea I had a while ago. "Freeverge.com" - coming soon to a store near you.