It is only a matter of time before every single company in the world makes some kind of iPhone/iPod Touch app and if you make home theater gear that mean it is a remote. Remotescape for the Kaleidescape is the latest addition and from the looks of the Youtube video embedded after the break, it is a pretty slick mix of gestures and cover art goodness. The bad news of course is that the graphics in the interface are on par with the rest of Kaleidescape's products and the price tag is $69 -- but if you dropped the $50k on the Kaleidescape media server, then you probably think that is cheap for a iPhone app.

Yeah, we know it's hard to believe but it seems it is actually true; the mobile DTV technologies from LG and Samsung have officially reached the final step on the way to becoming the formal ATSC-M/H standard. In the next four weeks the members will give it the final blessing, which means there should be plenty of mobile TV devices announced at CES in January. This should also mean that with any luck we'll be able to watch DTV on the go in 2010. At this point it seems that 70 of the almost 1800 full power stations in the US plan to launch mobile service later this year. Now for the bad news; the bandwidth for these mobile broadcasts will come from the existing spectrum, so in other words say hello to just a little more compression from your local HD affiliates.

VUDU keeps on rolling with new additions and this week it's an application for all those iPhone and iPod Touch owners. The free download allows you to browse or search the selection -- something that previously required a VUDU, or registered users could do on VUDU.com. It works pretty fast over 3G and even allows you to queue up rentals or purchases on the go -- nice. But it seems there isn't a way to add things to your wish list or to even rate titles; and worst of all, you can't use it as a remote for your VUDU -- which probably wouldn't be as useful as it is cool.

The iPhone has plenty of great applications but for whatever reason whenever one comes out -- like the new TiVoRemote pictured above -- that will help us control our home theater it looks as bad as you can imagine. Sure function is more important than form, but most of these are ridiculous. It's bad enough that the developers think you want to use a touch screen to control something like a directional pad -- imagine looking up to see the menu on the screen and then down to look at the remote 25 times -- but at least they could make it look cool. It's not that we hate all of 'em as the Apple Remote for the Apple TV and iTunes is really slick, but with all the possibilities when it comes to gestures and the iPhone's accelerometer, we'd think there'd be a decent solution by now.

The dream of an automated house has never been more achievable, and thanks to DIY software like Cinemar's Mainlobby, just about anyone can roll their own at a reasonable price. Of course, the more you can control with your home automation system the better. Now, in addition to being able to control lighting, security, home theater gear, thermostats, whole house audio and manage all your movies from a wall mounted touch screen, Mainlobby owners will soon be able to use their iPod Touch or iPhone as a remote. The key to making this work is Mainlobby's built in web server and Safari's extensive AJAX support -- sorry Windows Mobile fans. Unfortunately, this is only a first look, but these examples will be included in future versions of MLServer. And considering the lead developer on the project plans to use it as his "primary handheld controller," it should mean lots of future development. More pictures after the jump.

During the Jobsnote, Steve said that the iPhone would support many different email systems including Exchange -- and as we well know, the most precious Exchange feature to a mobile user is Direct Push, which allows your device to receive updates instantly for email and other data from your server. Steve did specifically mention that the iPhone would support Push-IMAP from Yahoo, but didn't mention any details about Exchange Direct Push like the Windows Mobile phones have. To many, this is the killer app for business users and it isn't too much of a stretch to believe that Apple could include it on the hot new iPhone. Exchange Direct Push is a Web Service that runs on the Outlook Web Access server; WM5 devices connect via HTTP and make calls for data and then leaves port 80 open for updates from the server, keeping the device up-to-date just like a BlackBerry.

Because this is all done via HTTP, it is possible to reverse engineer the protocol -- in fact, Zimbra has already done this, and WM5 devices can sync with a Zimbra server the same way they would an Exchange 2003 sp2 server. Reverse engineering OWA WebDAV (an extension of HTTP that allows users to manage files on a Outlook Web Access server) service is also nothing new, as Ximian first did it almost 5 years ago with its app Evolution, bringing Exchange Server functionality to Linux. It is also not new for Apple, which has used it to sync OS X users' Apple Mail and Address Book with Exchange since OS X 10.3. Coincidentally, this is also how Microsoft's own Entourage connects to Exchange, versus using MAPI (Microsoft's Proprietary mail API) like Outlook. As important as up to the second email is to business users, we don't see how Apple could afford to leave this feature out.