iPhone Universal Remote Case allows you to control all your dumb, IR-controlled gadgets

Thanks to the App Store, the iPhone and iPod Touch have a wide library of frankly excellent remote apps available to most users. If your device can accept commands through WiFi or Bluetooth, the iPhone family is the best universal remote out there… but with most homes filled to the gills with dumb gadgets that can only be controlled by blinking infrared beams, that’s a big “if.”

Power A’s latest product, the iPhone Universal Remote Case, adds the IR functionality to the iPhone and iPod Touch, allowing it to communicate with any of your household’s stupidest devices. The IR transmitter’s built right into the sleek case, which adds a minimal footprint to your existing device.

Once your handheld’s ensconced, controlling every gadget in your house is as simple as loading Power A’s app, which will even update itself with new device profiles overtime. Not bad indeed… although that $60 price seems a bit much.

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John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Hardware, iPhone, News |

Gates
Funny that everyone complains that the Sony PS3 has Bluetooth but no IR functionality because you can’t use a universal remote. I’d say IR control for the average home media device isn’t going away anytime soon.
John
If Logitech continues dumbing down (and overcharging for) its Harmony universal remotes, this may eventually surpass them in functionality. I wouldn’t want to buy two of these cases though (one for my wife and one for myself), so here’s hoping that the next iPhone rev includes an IR port for this type of functionality.
Maxx Wyler
I picked this up at my LAS and returned it three days later. It worked for the most part. I was able to program in every remote except Uverse. The case is OK, however I was not fond of the slick hard plastic. The software was the real deal breaker. No way to customize where or what buttons show up and only on set of FF/RW buttons. I was constantly scrolling all over the place. The other annoying thing was the accelerometer. The screen kept flipping when just barely moving the phone. Granted, you do have to hold the phone upside down to point the IR at the device, but just designed the app upside down and turning off the accelerometer may have been better. Also there is no database of remote types so you have to learn every button on every remote.