Using the iPhone as a Remote

We all know how cool the iPhone is going to be, but there’s one thing I would like to see the phone do. This is my idea and as far as I know it’s not real and no one else has written about it. It’s a mere concept so don’t take it too seriously!

How cool would it be if you could control you AppleTV or even your Mac with your iPhone. The iPhone would connect to the AppleTV and you could use the CoverFlow mode when searching through your music, movies or TV shows. The iPhone is going to use CoverFlow for music stored locally on the device so I don’t see why it couldn’t use it on a remote device. Obviously it might take some time to download all the artwork if you have a large library but it could download the first 20-30 covers and continue to download and load up in the background. It could even cache images to make it faster.

For using the remote on your Mac (not-Apple TV) it would be cool to get it to show Front Row as it appears on your television. It would be something like mini-Apple Remote Desktop. If you put your finger on the photos button in FrontRow it would do the same on your Mac. There could be a little Front Row button in the iPhone ‘dashboard’, pressing it would bring up a list of local machines that are allowing remote control access of FrontRow (these machines would advertise via bonjour or something…).

I only came up with this idea because I am using my MacBook to control my media box (a PowerMac G5). I use Apple Remote Desktop which works great, I just think have the small iPhone would be a lot cooler!!