Conventionally, digital home electronic apparatuses such as digital televisions (hereinafter referred to as DTV) and HDD recorders are provided with remote controllers dedicated to these apparatuses, and users operate these apparatuses through the remote controllers.
Furthermore, in general, a remote controller has buttons (also referred to as “keys”), such as a channel button and a mute button, each assigned with a function. With such a conventional remote controller, the users can operate the apparatus very comfortably as long as he/she uses each button only for the assigned function.
However, digital home electronic apparatuses available in recent years provide keyword search function and Internet browsing function, whereby the users have more opportunities to enter characters.
When the user enters characters using the conventional remote controller however, he/she generally selects a target character by pressing down a channel number button and the like several times. In other words, with the conventional remote controller, users cannot enter characters into digital home electronic apparatuses in an intuitive manner but have to get used to the operation, which has been proven to be troublesome to the users.
Accordingly, a technique has been disclosed in which a mobile terminal that is suitable for entering characters, such as a mobile phone, is used as a remote controller for a digital home electronic apparatus instead of the remote controller provided for the apparatus (for example, see Patent Literature (PTL) 1). With the above technique, the user can use an input unit such as a keyboard of the mobile terminal when entering characters, while using the mobile terminal for performing the same operation as the remote controller provided for the apparatus. The above technique aims at improving the operability in the above manner.