While many early adopter types (like me) have been fiddling with Airtunes, and looking for ways to turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a remote control for whole home audio, clearly the engineers at Apple have been doing the same, and building the native functionality into the iPhone OS 2.0 and the latest version of iTunes.The iTune remote page over at Apple pretty much explains it all. No longer will we need Signal.

Remote features include:

• Basic security for connecting iTunes and Apple TV libraries
• iPod controls user interface you are already used to when playing back content form a given library
• Intuitive search-as-you-type.  Very cool.  Type “r-o” get any content that contains such letter-sequence grouped as songs, artists, albums, etc.
• Multi-room destination control.  Remote allows you to control what rooms the audio plays back through if you are using Airtunes devices.
• Adjustable buffer size.  Allows you to adjust whether you want a short or long buffer enabling less  or more interference robustness and throughput reliability.

All good stuff.  Can’t wait to get my hands on it.  I specifically want to answer the following questions:

• How does it deal with multiple remotes in the same house?
• How well does the remote provide instant and clear state feedback on the current system configuration?
• How does a single remote deal with setting up a multi-source topology?
• How does it deal with contention for a single receiver, i.e. what happens if you try to send audio to the same room from two different libraries using two different remotes?
• How well in practice does the interference robustness perform?
• How annoying does the delay introduced by the buffer really become over time?

No matter the result, I am sure Apple will delight many with a feature no one was really expecting.