NETGEAR Developer Program teams with Qualcomm for smart apps galore

The first step in any awesome developer adventure is to prove to developers that working with a group like NETGEAR is worth the effort – now that they've got Qualcomm Atheros on their team, that goal just got a lot easier. What the folks at the newly announced NETGEAR Developer Program are showing off today to get people pumped up for the program itself is Qualcomm Atheros' Skifta. This Skifta app is not brand new, but it's definitely making the whole idea of developing for NETGEAR hardware seem well worth the effort.

What you've got with Skifta is an app that allows you to control the media that exists on your home network. If you've got a NETGEAR drive sitting in your network, you can access all of the songs, movies, photos, and more in an instant. We've got it running on a Motorola DROID RAZR M here today – which just so happens to run a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor under the hood – and the process in gaining access to our media was more than just simple – it was just a couple of taps!

What you're seeing here is our access to a slightly less traditional server, just to show you how versatile this system is. When we fire Skifta up on the DROID RAZR M, we see our Alienware gaming PC. This PC runs Windows 7 Home Premium and is connected to our wi-fi network with a collection of shared movies, photos, and songs.

We can choose to play a song straight from the Android device here – as shown, or we can connect to most DLNA/UPnP players around the house. You can connect to your PlayStation 3 if you want, or to your DLNA HDTV too – whatever you've got prepared. This process essentially turns your Android device into a one-stop-shop for controlling the media anywhere inside your home network. Open it up, scan, select, and play!

This is just one example of the wave of excellence that'll surely be popping up in the NETGEAR Developer Program soon – stay tuned and get jacked for more!