Review of the Remote iPhone Application

I have always wanted to make an “all-purpose” mobile device that could do a number of different things. Mostly, I wanted to use my cellular phone to control other electronic devices in my house. Now the iPhone has a free application that allows you to control both Apple TV's and computers with iTunes installed.

The Remote app is designed to turn your phone into an iTunes remote. What you do is open the application up, then go to the nearest machine running iTunes and open the software. On the list of mobile devices that it is reading should be your phone. Go into your Remote application and select either Change or Find Library. From here you will be able to add a library, and it will then give you a four-digit passcode. Go into iTunes on the computer or Apple TV that you wish to control, select your mobile device, and enter the passcode where it tells you to. Now you can control the library, playing the files that you want, searching for media you would like to find, and even controlling the volume.

The best thing about this app is that you can add multiple machines to your list and save them for the next time you are near by. This makes it very easy to control not only all of your appropriate devices, but all of your friends' computers as well. Whenever you get close the device you can activate the remote, find their library, and begin using it again.

Unfortunately the Remote app does not let you use the media on the mobile device. It also has a difficult time working at a distance, and you may find many random moments when it will not even be read by the machine when it is near by.

Never the less, this is an essential application for every iPhone or iPod Touch owner, mostly because it is free. Try it out on as many devices as possible and see how easy it can be to integrate all of your media sharing technologies.