Hasta La Gadget!

There are a gazillion apps to turn your iPhone into a remote control, and let you operate your computer, your Sonos home music system or even your DirecTV DVR. The problem is, they work over Wi-Fi, whereas your TV, stereo and DVD-players all swallow up infra-red light in order to follow your distant commands.

That changes with the little $50 L5 iPhone Remote, a dongle that plugs into the dock connector and allows you iPhone to become a proper universal remote, spitting invisible light at all manner of home electronics. It comes with a free companion application that lets you program and assign the frequencies, and you can drag and drop the button icons around the screen until you’re happy with them.

The first version, which should be shipping soon, has a significant drawback in that you need to teach it the correct signals by pointing your remote, but downloadable, pre-programmed codes will be coming in the future. On this point, the FAQ entry is pretty funny:

In testing, users designed their UI and learned the signals in about 3.5 minutes. In the same amount of time, database users were still trying to read the model numbers off the backs of their A/V devices.

The other problem is cosmetic. The remote app is ugly. That may not worry you, as this will cheaply replace all your remotes with one single device, and it will apparently also work with the iPad. And the iPhone is much less likely to be lost down the back of the sofa.

L5 iPhone Remote [L5 via Uncrate]

There’s no rest for the Apple rumor mill, is there? It seems
like only yesterday (well, early last week) that everyone was in a tizzy about
Apple’s forthcoming tablet. The thing came out, Apple called it the iPad, and a
lot of people came out of the whole thing seemingly underwhelmed.

So, where does that put us, less than a week after Apple
expected to change the world? More rumors about more tablets. Remember all of
that talk about the company’s plan to introduce the iPad in a few different
sizes? Well, according to the most recent rumor, Cupertino
is hard at work on a 15.4 inch version of the thing.

The new, larger version of the iPad will reportedly run OS
X, unlike its iPhone OS-enabled predecessor. “If there is any truth to that, we
could learn something as soon as Apple’s WWDC event this year,” writes
TechCrunch, the site leading the charge on this later rumor, “which will likely
take place in June (just as it does every year).”

Sony Ericsson has unveiled the Aspen, a Microsoft-powered business smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard and a 2.4-inch, 240-by-320-pixel QVGA touch screen.

The phone itself looks fairly unremarkable, but it turns out the Aspen is running Windows Mobile 6.5.3, which would make it the first handset to do so. Windows Mobile 6.5.3 includes support for glass capacitive touch screens with multi-touch–meaning that we could finally see some Windows Mobile phones that respond properly to finger touches instead of a stylus.

The idea behind Michael Greenberg’s iPad steering wheel accessory is a very good one, but his implementation is a little off.

We can expect to see a lot of accessories for the forthcoming iPad, at least as many plastic widgets as are available for the iPhone. A gamer’s steering wheel will doubtless be one of them, making the slim iPad easier to hold and also making it feel like you’re driving a read car (a real car with no seats, body work, or anything other than a steering wheel, but you get the point).

The trouble with Greenberg’s iDrift is that it is little more than a cheap plastic circle, with four cut-outs so the iPad can be slid inside. It looks more like the packaging a game accessory would come in than the product itself.

Still, Greenberg still seems pretty proud of the thing. Look at the picture and you’ll see he’s signed it.

No iPad Jokes Get The iDrift? [Yanko]