The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation announced today the availability of its Real Time Congress iPhone app. The app displays an up-to-the-minute feed of updates from the House and Senate floors, Whip notices, hearings scheduled and key government documents as they are released. Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight’s years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there’s no search and the app doesn’t make use of the iPhone’s push capabilities. It’s not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples’ day-to-day lives. Sponsor Asked about push notifications, Josh Ruihley, Sunlight’s Technical Program Officer told us. “It’s definitely on the road map. Currently, every document, hearing and floor update you see in the app is tagged by the piece of legislation it is related to. Our next phase is to actually represent those relationships in the UI.” Discuss

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Sunlight Brings Congress to Your iPhone

AT&T has announced a new line of Android-based smartphones for 2010. Dell , HTC and Motorola will make the five new devices, which are scheduled to be released during the first half of 2010. Endgadget is predicting that AT&T will be using the Motorola Backflip, while Slashgear has confirmed that the Mini 3i will be the choice for Dell . The other three, Endgadget says, will most likely go to HTC. Sponsor The announcement is good for AT&T customers who wanted an Android phone but are held under contract with the company. Up until now, AT&T has offered the iPhone and a variety of Palm and Blackberry devices, but nothing operating the Android OS. The company made the announcement today at CES where they also announced new initiatives to increase the number of applications available to their customers. To this end, the company is offering a new software developer kit and is looking to sign new distribution deals in order to offer its phone apps worldwide. Nokia also announced today that its Ovi mobile application store will be available to AT&T customers in the United States. Full details can be found in the company’s press release . Discuss

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AT&T Comes Over to the Android Side

YouTube announced today that in conjunction with CNN the site is now offering an opportunity for users to submit and vote on questions for world leaders to be asked at next week’s UN Climate Change Conference . It’s the first use of the Digg-like Google Moderator on YouTube and the whole endeavor looks a lot like the Digg Dialogue series with leaders and celebrities. Can events like this draw a significant crowd to hear about the issues? How do crowd-voted questions stack up against questions thought up by expert journalists? Can anything YouTube and CNN do prevent the tides from rising so far that these become academic questions in short order? Stay tuned to find out. Sponsor It’s very nice to see YouTube leveraging its audience to try to prevent the displacement of hundreds of millions of people and the degradation of all life on earth. Hopefully there will be a big ad on the front page pointing to the campaign. It’s not hard to imagine other very large websites doing something similar. It could make a difference! Discuss

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Are We All Going to Die? YouTube Holds Vote on Climate Change Questions