iPhone News Updated

$1500 CasaTunes XL multi-room music server has support for the iPhone

CasaTools announced a new multi-room CasaTunes XL Music Server that has support for the iPhone. The CasaTunes XL Music Server comes pre-loaded with CasaTunes Software, a 250GB hard drive, touch screen control and up to nine sources of music, depending on the model.

After answering a few simple questions and adding one or more multi-channel amps, such as the CasaTunes XLa, and speakers, CasaTunes XL is ready to go. The 250 GB hard drive defaults to over 1,600 albums, or 20,000 songs, of high quality music. For growing collections, there is an available slot for a second hard drive. New music can be easily added from CDs via iTunes, Windows Media Player or by adding music from the Internet.

The CasaTunes XLi Music Server ships with four built-in internal music sources and one external source for up to six rooms of music listening. While the CasaTunes XLe Music Server ships with five built-in internal music sources and four external sources to control music in up to 12 rooms of a home and is scalable to four external boxes and 48 rooms. Each internal music source is capable of playing music from iPhone or iPod, iTunes Plus, Windows Media Player, and SHOUTcast Internet Radio. These external sources can be used to listen to AM/FM tuners, XM or Sirius satellite radios as well as for advanced functionality such as doorbell and paging support.

Homeowners can also control CasaTunes from Internet browsers (like iPhone’s Safari), any computer or Internet browser on the local network. The CasaTunes XL Music Server has a MSRP starting at $1,499.

[Thanks: http://www.iphoneworld.ca]

TECH TIPS: Control all your computers from one iPhone

I’ve gone on record defining the iPhone to really be a mobile computer that can also make cell phone calls. It uses OS X, the Macintosh operating system to run software such as productivity, game, Internet applications and more. A platform is an underlying computer system on which application programs can run. On personal computers, Windows, Linux and the Mac OS X are examples of different platforms. Sometimes just the OS itself can be referred to as a platform. Conversely the hardware itself can also be called a platform and in my opinion, the iPhone absolutely is a computer platform.

Just because there are fewer Mac owners out there doesn’t mean I shouldn’t write about things that run on the Mac. Who knows? I may write about something for the Mac that may be just the thing you need and can’t do on your PC. As a computer columnist, it’s my job to inform you about what I feel to be important information for all platforms, big and small. The iPhone is becoming an important computer platform that continues to expand in its abilities. And now there’s a new iPhone application that lets you totally and remotely control all of your other computers.

Known as “Virtualization,” applications that let you control a computer remotely using another computer have been around for a while now. You literally see the screen of the remote computer on the computer’s screen at your location. Moving the mouse on your system correspondingly moves the mouse on the remote PC. You can click on folders, copy files, run applications, load and save files, you can do everything that can be done sitting in front of a computer using the remote system running the virtualization application. But until now, you needed a desktop or notebook computer to run the virtualization software. Now you can do it on an iPhone.
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