ThinkFlood has come out with their RedEye universal remote control system designed for iPhone and iPod touch.

Using a free iPhone application and the RedEye device, you will be able to convert your iPhone or iPod touch into a universal remote control that are sending out commands via the InfraRed frequencies. The free iPhone application will let you control your TV, DVD player, cable box, DVR and many other devices that receive standard infrared signals.

As easy as a touch for the button, you could watch TV, listen to music, play a video. Moreover, the custom screen layouts for each activity mean you never have to hunt for the right button.

The RedEye device also serves as a charging dock. The system supports multiple rooms, controllers and users simultaneously and RedEye users can customize the way they control their equipment with touchscreen buttons, Apple’s Multi-Touch gestures, and accelerometer controls.

Soon, you’ll need more than two hands to count the number of Android phones on the market. At this rate, it seems inevitable that the number of phones running Google’s open source operating system will eventually outnumber the number of iPhones, which run Apple’s proprietary (and closed) operating system.

It’s a situation that has many observers thinking back to the 1980s, when IBM introduced its PC and eclipsed Apple in market share by betting on open platforms. In the end, Apple was left with a respectable business, but a single-digit morsel of the PC market share. (The Mac has since crept up to 9.4 percent, according to IDC.)

How could Google draft more customers into the Android army and diminish the iPhone’s market share? Focus on the iPhone’s weaknesses, of course. The iPhone’s lack of background-processing capability (i.e., the ability to run multiple third-party apps at once) could push multitasking professionals toward Android. And the notoriety of iPhone’s exclusive carrier in the United States, AT&T, could compel consumers to embrace Android phones carried by Verizon, which has a bigger network and a better reputation for service.

Then there’s the App Store. Despite harboring upward of 90,000 apps, and letting a few developers earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Apple’s App Store approval process has been roundly criticized for being opaque. Apple has rejected some apps submitted by third-party developers for unclear reasons. Programmers complain it’s difficult or impossible to communicate with the secretive Cupertino, California, company.

Did we mention the App Store is overcrowded? In a way, that’s a plus for consumers: the more choices, the better. But it can be a headache for third-party programmers, who have difficulty getting exposure for their apps in an increasingly cluttered space. The flaws of the App Store could drive away the people who create the element that makes the iPhone so appealing — its wealth of apps furthering the capabilities of the handset.

There’s a lot at stake. Research firm Gartner this week stated that worldwide smartphone shipments would grow 29 percent year over year to 180 million units, exceeding notebook shipments. That would suggest smartphones are shaping up to become the next major computing platform — and the companies who control the dominant platforms stand to gain billions in revenue.

Still, most analysts and developers polled by Wired.com aren’t too worried about Apple’s prospects in the smartphone space.

“This is not going to be a space with two giants,” said Raven Zachary, a technology analyst and owner of iPhone app-development house Small Society. “It’s going to be a healthy competitive environment for some time to come.”

Relatively young, the mobile platform ecosystem is a new kind of beast in the technology world. Unlike the PC industry — where Microsoft conquered the operating system market, claiming roughly 90 percent market share to date — the mobile space has multiple companies fighting for their fair share of the pie. Some of those players include Research In Motion, Palm, Symbian and Microsoft.

With an early start, Microsoft did have a chance to dominate the mobile landscape. The software titan launched its first mobile OS back in 1996: Windows CE, which served as the foundation for the Windows Mobile OS shipping with some smartphones today. However, in terms of market share, Windows Mobile has been in steady decline. In 2008, its market share dropped to 14 percent — down from 23 percent in 2004.

With 49 percent market share, Symbian is currently the dominant force in the smartphone platform space, according to Gartner. Gartner predicts Symbian will retain its dominance, and the firm is especially optimistic about Android: Gartner predicts Android will leap to 18 percent market share (up from 1.6 percent to date). Meanwhile, the firm has a less optimistic outlook for Apple: 2.9 percent growth by 2012, giving the company 13.6 percent market share.

These numbers lead Joe Wilcox of BetaNews to declare that “iPhone cannot win the smartphone wars,” in an article that has sparked much debate in the tech community this week. He argues that Android, which is expanding onto other mobiles devices in addition to smartphones (such as Barnes and Noble’s “Nook” e-book reader) is poised to conquer this space.

“Another ‘everyone else against Apple battle’ is coming, with Android looking to be the better OS around which an ecosystem grows and thrives,” Wilcox wrote. “There’s a Star Wars metaphor here somewhere. Apple lost out to DOS/Windows because of the attack of the PC clones. Now the droids are coming for iPhone.”

Tero Kuittinen, an MKM Partners telecom analyst, disagrees, and he isn’t as optimistic about Android because of its bumpy start.

“The key point about Android is the first few models haven’t really been doing great,” Kuittinen said in a phone interview. “Based on that there’s no real evidence that the demand of Android phones is rampant.”

Kuittinen noted that European customers already seem “cautious” about Android because of the sluggish, buggy experience of the earliest Google phones.

Other than technical issues, Google has many areas to address before posing a serious threat, such as offering a compelling music substitute for Android smartphones to battle iTunes, Kuittinen said. Google is just getting started with a music solution: The search giant on Wednesday launched a new music-search feature, which automatically searches for playable music tracks.

Andreas Schobel, co-founder of Snaptic, which develops apps for both Android and the iPhone, said the Android OS has a lot of catching up to do in terms of user interface.

“The UI still sucks; it’s just not being able to pinch, not being able to use gestures, that makes it rough,” Schobel said. “It’s getting better, but it’s still not there yet.”

However, Schobel foresees a division occurring between consumers who opt for Android and those who stick with an iPhone. He noted that Android stands a chance to win over productivity-focused users due to its ability to handle multiple apps simultaneously, which the iPhone cannot do. He added that Android’s open API enables developers to easily create “mash-up” apps that can seamlessly integrate social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter into any app.

Though Android might become a popular platform for productivity, the iPhone will still be the primary handset for gaming, Schobel predicted. Game developers are more attracted to coding a game for the iPhone, because they’re programming a game to work with a specific piece of hardware and take full advantage of its graphic chip — an effort that would not be easy with an open platform like Android, an OS designed for multiple phones using different types of hardware.

In any case, Schobel said Android is gaining momentum fast, and Apple must continue to innovate in order to stay ahead of the smartphone OS curve.

“People on Android are going to be pushing forward in such a feverish pace, and Apple is going to have to start doing stuff really soon,” Schobel said.

Just what determines who “wins” a smartphone platform war? That’s subjective. Wilcox bases his argument purely on market-share numbers; whoever gets the biggest slice of the pie wins by his definition.

But Zachary said the iPhone is still a winner at its current size, and he’d be happy if it one day grew to grab 25 percent of the mobile-platform market share — not a dominating number.

In a space that’s crowded with several players, a definitive loss would be the complete failure and disappearance of a company. Zachary and Schobel are both betting Palm will be the first to go. Palm’s WebOS runs on the Palm Pre, and the company currently possesses 0 percent market share, according to Gartner, who predicts WebOS’ market share will only grow 1.4 percent in the next three years.

The company’s smartphone market share continues to shrink, and Zachary said he previously thought Palm would eventually be acquired by a larger company, such as Samsung, to develop mobile operating systems in-house. However, because Google hands out Android as a free, open source OS, this decreases the value of Palm as an acquisition target.

“Who I’m really scared for is Palm,” Schobel said. “They’re dead.”

Rumor site 9to5Mac reports that Apple is on the cusp of releasing an FM radio application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. And get this: it will be for the current models, not for some new hardware revision. According to the rumor, Apple will awaken the slumbering FM transceiver already dormant within the devices, currently only used to talk to the Nike+ widget

This speculation seems to fit in with Apple’s switching on of the Bluetooth functionality inside the second-gen iPod Touch with the 3.0 software update, but the rumor then gets a little weird:

The holdup on this app is that Apple is trying to integrate the Mobile iTunes Store purchases into the functionality of the program.

Yes. Apple, which has already managed to put tune-tagging into the iPod Nano, is apparently having trouble doing it with the way-more-powerful iPhone platform. This sounds like nonsense, but it doesn’t mean we won’t see a radio app. What great news. Now there will be, along with the stocks application, yet another app that I will never use yet cannot remove from my iPod.

In-house Radio.app in the works for iPhone and iPod touch [9to5Mac]

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There’s a new native iPhone app for Flickr, created by Yahoo’s mobile team. It’s currently available in English and French in the US, Canada, UK, France, Hong Kong and Singapore Apple iTunes stores. Download it for free now!

You can take a photo and upload it from the app, view your photostream and activity, and see recent photos from your contacts. There’s also the nifty slideshow that features the “Ken Burns effect”.

There are a lot of ways to use Flickr on your mobile device. There are a whole lot of third party iPhone apps that work great with Flickr, including Mobile Fotos, FlickIt and Darkslide.

And of course, you can always use m.flickr.com, our mobile browser experience that’s available across hundreds of devices in 21 countries.

Finally, there are several hardware manufacturers including BlackBerry and Nokia who have built in “send to Flickr” right from their phones, which we love!