According to a patent application discovered by Looprumours the iPhone could act as a remote control device for the Apple TV.
The patent, entitled Multi-media center for computing systems was published on 12th April and assigned to Apple Computer, Inc. The patent was filed on October 10 2005.
With all the innovative features that the iPhone has its not too far fetched that Apple would want to integrate it with some of their other devices. The patent doesn’t mention any specific devices so its a fair assumption that if any devices are going to control the Apple TV it might be the next generation iPod as well as / instead of the iPhone.
[0023] It will be appreciated that the computing environment 100 can provide a “central-user-interface” that can serve as a user interface for accessing all the media-components provided in the multi-media center. Referring now to FIG. 1, a main menu 104 displayed on a display 102 can be part of the central-user-interface for a multi-media center provided by the computing system 108. Furthermore, user input may be entered via an input device 106 (e.g., keyboard, mouse) connected to a computing system 108, and/or via a remote device 107 (e.g., remote controller, media-player with remote control capabilities) whether directly or via a network. The computing system 108 can, for example, be a computer, or a plurality of computers (e.g., a cluster). In general, the computing system 108 includes at least one processor and memory (not shown).
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The “same” patent have Microsoft with their Xbox, Zune and “ZunePhone”. I think Apple and Microsoft do the right thing for the Multimedia Future…