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Are you tired of putting down your iPhone to pick up the remote for changing TV channels? A new product set to unveil at CES may put an end to that tiresome routine. With the aid of a $50 bit of hardware and a free app you can use your iPhone or iPod touch as a universal remote.

The L5 Remote (measures 1.25 x .85 inches) , available in February, attaches to the iPhone or iPod touch dock connection.

The remote works with a free app available from the App Store. The app allows you to customize your remote, moving buttons for your home entertainment devices.

The gadget doesn’t require batteries, Wi-Fi or external power and has a 30-foot range. Although the Loop links to the L5 Technology website, the pages detailing the remote seem to be password-protected.

[Via The Loop]

There are more than 13 million online mentions of “Apple tablet,” according to Google. With tankers of ink emptied writing about the fabled device and a supposed Jan. 26 announcement looming, a New York Times columnist takes aim at all the hoopla.

“There hasn’t been this much hype about a tablet since Moses came down from the mountain,” writes media reporter David Carr. Carr (who calls the rumored Apple device the “Jesus tablet”) was just one of more than two dozen mentions in the Times in December 2009, alone, according to Fortune.

What is it?
Political GPS is, hands down, the best way to leverage your iPhone or iPod Touch as a tool for political activism.

Created by Thomas Huntington, this handy dandy app can help pinpoint your personal location in the political spectrum, provides unprecedentedly comprehensive contact and biographical information for every senator and member of congress in Washington, DC, allows quick access to the full text and summary of every bill passed by the US Congress, back to the 106th — including all versions and amendments — and features the full texts of such seminal documents of freedom as the US Constitution, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Why it’s Cool:
Did you resolve to become more politically active in the coming year?

Perhaps you’re disenchanted with the return you seem to be getting from your vote in 2008 for Barack Obama or your local senator or congressperson. Perhaps you find yourself firmly in the Libertarian/Conservative quadrant of the political compass and smell both blood and an opportunity to swing the balance of power rightward in November’s midterm elections. Perhaps you’re just intrigued by the idea of a tool that might help you make your voice more easily heard with your representatives in congress.

Political GPS is the app you’ve been waiting for.

No flashy graphics or a fancy GUI here, but a quick 30 question survey helps you place your own political leanings on a compass-like map that measures general attitudes toward ideas of economic and social freedom, plotting your answers on axes measuring liberal/conservative and anarchist/totalitarian tendencies, as well as those for communism/libertarianism and socialism/fascism.

You can view your results in a theoretical landscape or plot them against the views of historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Ronald Reagan.

Full disclosure: this writer’s views aligned most closely with Ghandi and the Dalai Lama.

Then the real fun begins. Political GPS’s Congress Tracker gives you detailed information for each member of the US Congress. From biographical information and links to each member’s website to in-depth voting information and the ability to easily contact each member by phone, email, or Twitter, Political GPS helps you to learn more about your congress.

The search engine built into political GPS is far more robust and sophisticated than something you might expect to pay $2 for. Search representatives by name or state, search congressional bills by topic, content, title, or bill number; the member tracker and bill tracker databases are linked, too. Comprehensive information about the laws passed by congress and the people passing them has never been so easily accessed.

Full text access to historical documents is the lagniappe in Political GPS. Easily study the US Constitution, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man right inside the app. Organized by Articles, Sections, and Amendments, it’s easy to go right to the area you want to read and it’s all easy on the eyes with large fonts and antique parchment backgrounds that give the documents a weighty feel without making them harder to read.

For anyone who believes in the idea that you should be the change you want to see in this world, Political GPS is certainly one of the coolest tools available to American iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Where to get it:
Political GPS is available at the Apple iTunes App Store in both free and $1.99 versions. But really, just pony up the $2 and make your voice heard.

According to a lone anonymous tipster writing into to Silicon Alley Insider, Apple COO Tim Cook is executive search firm Specer Stuart’s first choice for CEO of General Motors.

According to their tipster:

[Interim GM CEO Edward E. Whitacre] wants the candidate to come from a company known for operational excellence, innovation and customer satisfaction and in addition he is looking for someone that has turnaround experience. It also doesn’t hurt that [Tim] has been able to work with Jobs. Whitacre does want to stay on as Chairman.  Also, Cook has been the key link to AT&T and should understand the culture that Whitacre,  [a former AT&T CEO] built.

Responding to an inquiry made by the FCC to explore the transition to an IP-based communications network, AT&T has asked that a firm date be set for the total extinction of landlines.

“With each passing day, more and more communications services migrate to broadband and IP-based services, leaving the public switched telephone network (‘PSTN’) and plain-old telephone service (‘POTS’) as relics of a by-gone era,” AT&T wrote.

They continued: “It makes no sense to require service providers to operate and maintain two distinct networks when technology and consumer preferences have made one of them increasingly obsolete.”

Given AT&T’s fundamental inability to address the substandard service and network congestion caused by their iPhone exclusivity deal with Apple, it seems blushingly laughable that the telecom would now be asking for the death of landlines, which can only increase network congestion.

But AT&T has a point: for everything but businesses and emergency services, landlines are already a technology of the dodo. AT&T must spend considerable money every year maintaining an increasingly obsolete network, which means funneling away from the development of the clear and rapidly evolving future of telephone communication.

On November 12th, 2009, dozens of Apple.com Discussion Board users began to notice that they were suddenly experiencing the sort of quick battery loss in their Bluetooth keyboards that usually exhibits itself in arcs of purple electrical plasma shooting off a Tesla coil. Keyboards that once lasted for several months without a recharge now required nearly weekly battery swaps, even when using high-capacity batteries or rechargeables.

So far, there’s been no official word from Apple about the cause of the keyboard power drains, but consensus seems to be that Apple’s new Magic Mouse is the culprit, somehow preventing the Bluetooth keyboard from going into sleep mode. According to one user, swapping a Magic Mouse for a Logitech mouse eliminated the problem entirely.

There’s no official word from Apple when this bug will be squashed, although according to one Discussion Board user, an Apple Tech Support worker said that it’s a known Bluetooth driver issue, and a fix is in the works.

Any of our own Magic Mouse aficionados out there capable of confirming this problem as ubiquitous?

[via TUAW]

Every New Year’s Day, Japanese consumers line up to take place in the annual tradition of the fukubukuro, in which merchants sell sealed bags of mystery gifts at huge discounts.

For example, if you go into your local video game store, you might pick up a bag of game discs for $100. Walk into the local butcher’s, and you might take your pick of any number of dripping canvas sacks of mystery meat for a nominal fee.

Apple’s Japan Stores have been taking part in the fukubukuro celebration since 2005, and starting Saturday, customers have been lining up to buy a limited number of Lucky Bags for about $380.

With more and more consumers consumers cleaving themselves from the fetid macro-organism of biomassed holiday shopping flesh and doing all of their Christmas shopping online, online customers satisfaction polls are more important than ever. No surprise, though, at the latest polls, courtesy of ForeSee Results: Apple’s simple, pleasant and spartan store did well in consumer’s lists of the best online shopping experience of 2009.

Surveying more than 10,000 visitors to the top forty retail web sites, Apple ranked 82% in customer satisfaction, which is four percentage points higher than their 2008 ranking. Following in Apple’s wake was Newegg.com (8!5), TigerDirect.com (80%), Dell.com (78%), HP (79%) and Circuit City (73%).

That’s not to say that Apple totally destroyed the competition, though. Amazon.com, which is still about the best online shopping experience around, rubbed Apple’s nose in its mess with an astonishing 87% customer satisfaction rating. The reliably stalwart Netflx also did well at 86%, although not being a home television shopper myself, I’m a bit mystified by QVC.com’s impressive 83% rating.

[via ComputerWorld]

Apple has updated its patent for Wii-like “Wand” remote control, providing a magnetic compass and accelerometer for better control and precision. Apple TV is one potential beneficiary, reports suggested Thursday.

The Cupertino, Calif. company initially filed the “Wand” application in mod-2009, including an accelerometer like the Wii. The update, filed on the last day of 2009, describes the wand’s operations:

Not all boats float on a rising tide. That seems to be the lesson Apple is learning with its Apple TV, a device analysts say has not benefited from increased sales of the company’s other products, including iMacs and iPods and even the lowly Magic Mouse. Apple TV sales rose just 10 percent in 2009, despite an upgraded Apple TV 3.0 OS.

The minor growth was likely due to 2008 being a slow year, not because the streaming device made any inroads into a hard-to-define market, NPD Group vice president of industry analysis Steven Baker said.

Keeping New Year’s resolutions is hard. Who has the willpower? Here’s 10 iPhone apps that might help.

Confirming last week’s Financial Times report that Apple has rented out the Yerba Buene Center for the Arts in San Francisco for a January 26th event, Clayton Morris over at Fox News is now reporting that the January event will be “big” and focus on the “mobility space.”

Quoth Morris:

I’ve spoken to a source inside Apple who confirmed a “big” event for January.

While nothing official has been handed down from the notoriously tight-lipped company, my source took the Financial Times report one step further by saying this event will focus on the mobility space, meaning we’ll see something related to the iPhone/iPod touch product line.

Since iPhone and iPod Touch announcements are usually made in June, that means this event is going to focus on something like the iPhone, but a wholly new product. *cough* Apple Tablet. *cough cough*

[via TUAW]

If recent CNBC listings are anything to go by, someone in their programming department got wind that there is set to be an exciting new Apple product announced next month. Hot on the heels of news about CNBC’s planned airing of the Welcome to Macintosh documentary on January 4th comes word that that the 60 minute documentary MacHEADS will air a day later on January 5th, 2010 at 10PM ET.

Like Welcome to Macintosh, this isn’t a documentary I’ve seen yet, but the official site describes the documentary as an exploration of “the loyalty of Apple fanatics and their obsession with the company and its products. The documentary takes an in-depth examination of just what makes the Mac, the iPhone, and Apple’s other products seem like cultural phenomena rather than just consumer electronics.”

If you don’t have a Tivo or have pressing engagements on January 5th, it will also be airing on January 6th at 1AM ET, January 7th at 9PM ET, January 8th at 12AM ET, January 9th at 7PM ET and January 10th at 10PM ET. CNBC’s getting a lot of mileage out of this one.

If you’re interested in checking MacHEADS out, you can see the official trailer here.

The popularity of the iPod doesn’t make it immune to accusations of being the cause of society’s ills, and for the last few years, Apple has faced numerous complaints that the iPod promotes hearing loss. The complaints have been taken seriously enough by some to prompt the European Union to consider introducing legislation that would limit iPods and other portable media players to a maximum output of 85db.

Luckily, common sense seems to be prevailing in the American iPod hearing loss debate. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just affirmed a 2008 ruling that dismissed a case brought against Apple that claimed the iPod promoted hearing loss.

The original suit was brought against Apple by a Louisiana man, who hoped to escalate it to class action status. The suit claimed that the iPod had the potential to cause irreparable hearing loss, thanks to the lack of external volume meters on the iPod itself and the design of the ear buds encouraging too-deep placement. The suit was dismissed because the judge wryly noted that the lawsuit didn’t actually prove that the iPod was dangerous, but was instead just a long list of how it could possibly be made safer.

It wasn’t a suit with much merit, and it’s good to see it dismissed. Although it’s certainly conscientious to make a device safer, I hope most people realize that keeping your iPod’s volume at an acceptable level and not cramming your ear buds down into your cochleas with your thumbs are the user’s responsibility.

Former Quicktime guru Steve Perlman has been flogging his latest startup, OnLive, for awhile now. He’s hawking a thin client for gaming, which requires a bit of explanation: think of gaming in the cloud. Instead of installing an MMORPG or FPS on your Mac, you instead logon to a central server with beefy hardware, which pumps out the game to you over the Internet.

In very loose theory, that means that you can play the hottest and most technically advanced games on even the lowest-specced computers or handheld devices: the server does all the rendering, and basically streams to the user a live video of the game being played according to his or her button and mouse clicks. In even looser theory, you could play even the most graphically demanding PC games on your iPhone.

Last week, Perlman demonstrated the OnLive technology to his alma mater, Columbia University. It’s an impressive demonstration, but there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of Perlman’s claims.

It’s less than twenty four hours until 2010, and at a time when most of us will be confronting a numb, vacant hole where our sobriety used to be tomorrow morning, it’ll be easy to overlook another hole in our day-to-day Mac lives: official Boot Camp support for Microsoft’s excellent new update to their Windows operating system, Windows 7.

You might recall that in October, Apple promised in a support document to roll-out Windows 7 support to Boot Camp before the end of 2009.

“Apple will support Microsoft Windows 7 (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate) with Boot Camp in Mac OS X Snow Leopard before the end of the year,” the support document notes. “This support will require a software update to Boot Camp.”

With the clock ticking, Apple Insider sought out an Apple support representative fielding Boot Camp related questions for a statement. He said that his division had still been given no update on Windows 7 Boot Camp support, and his belief was that the update was still undergoing tests, adding that it was unlikely that the update would surface anytime before the drop of the ball.

Of course, Windows 7 already runs in Boot Camp, with a few driver hiccups, so you don’t really have to wait for Apple if you don’t want to. Still, let’s look forward to completely painless Windows 7 Boot Camp support in 2010, eh? The earlier, the better.

More tantalizing hints on Apple’s forthcoming tablet come their way to us today from China, where former Google China president Ka-ifu Lee has posted alleged hands-on impressions of the device on his sina.com.cn microblog.

What a difference a year makes. That seems to be the take-away from new retail analysis showing a 50 percent increase in sales of iWork 2009 over iWork 2008. In the first 11 months it was available, iWork 2009 sold 50 percent more copies than iWork 2008, according to NPD Group.

Much of the credit appears to go to the popularity of Mac OS X 10.6, known as “Snow Leopard”. iWork and iLife comes bundled with the box upgrade. A single-user version costs $169 and a family-version costs $229.

There have been times when I’ve wanted to slit a throat over the altar of Word to keep a buggy file from crashing but wonder if this is some kind of divine castigation for downloaders?

Via Digg

Apple will have a ‘blowout’ December quarter, selling 9.5 million iPhones with strong Mac and iPod demand creating $12.4 billion in revenue for the Cupertino, Calif. company, an analyst told investors Wednesday.

“Despite strong macroeconomic headwinds and ever rising investor expectations, we anticipate Apple could post material upside to recently raised consensus estimates,” wrote Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw Wu. The company appears to be firing on all cyclinders, its iPhone, iPod and Mac units viewed as fueling the optimism.

Even when they’re dead, Apple products are still timely  — like the iPod clock or the G4 timepiece.

Here’s a nice step-by-step transformation of a defunct Power Mac G5 into a sleek wall clock.

It’s the handiwork of Japanese Apple fan NOBON — the same one who “printed” Fuji apples with the Apple logo.

Via NOBON

Finnish cell phone giant Nokia Tuesday told a U.S. trade court “virtually all” of Apple products, including the iPhone, iPod and Mac, infringe its patents. The move seeks to halt imports of Apple products.

The seven patents named “allow better user experience, lower manufacturing costs, smaller size and longer battery life for Nokia products.” Nokia said its complaint filed before the U.S. International Trade Commission “is about protecting the results of such pioneering development.”

It’s nice to see good work pay off. While Steve Jobs walked home with his customary $1 salary and $1 bonus for 2009 Apple COO Tim Cook — who stepped into Jobs’ shoes for five months while Steve Jobs underwent a liver transplant — made out much better: his year end renumeration for 2009 was a cool $14 million.

The vast majority of that money went to Cook in the form of $12.3 million worth of Apple stocks… a significant jump from his 2007 and 2008 stock awards of $7 million and $6 million, respectively. Cook also got a $100,000 salary raise, up to $800,000, and a cash bonus of $800,000 to match.

Don’t feel bad for Jobs, though: although that two bucks he earned in 2009 won’t even pay for a cup of coffee, his 5.5 million shares of Apple stock are currently valued at $1,163,855,000.

[via TUAW]

This is likely just a traffic grab, but according to the Quick PWN blog reporting “inside sources”, Apple’s forthcoming tablet will indeed be called the iSlate, but it won’t be a tablet computer: it’ll be an eBook reader, and positioned to go head-to-head with the likes of the Kindle and Nook.

You might have missed Welcome to Macintosh when it debuted at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco earlier this year, and you may have chosen to save $15 by not picking it up on iTunes, but no need to fret : the indie documentary that intimately examines the history of Apple will be airing next Monday.

The documentary, which features interviews from Andry Hertzfeld, Guy Kawasaki, Jim Reekes and Ron Wayne, will air on CNBC on January 4th, 2010 at 9:30PM ET. Woz isn’t in it, but he liked it, describing it as “on the mark” and the best indepent film regarding Apple that he has seen. He also said how much he appreciated how “unbelievable” it was to see people “say that great of things about me.”

Ars Technica also liked Welcome to Macintosh: “”If you liked Pirates of Silicon Valley or read Revolution in the Valley, then this film is for you.”

So gentlemen, set your Tivos, then let me know if it’s worth the rent: we don’t exactly get CNBC over here in Germany.

[via TUAW, image via Thomas Marban]