[Sigia-l] A $1000 un-usable remote control FULL TEXT

[Anthony Hempell]

Copyright be damned... here it is.

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King of Remotes, but Try to Grasp It
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: September 2, 2004

 

Naum Kazhdan/The New York Times
NOT SO FAST The ProntoPro requires a manual to understand the manual.
Behind it, the entry-level ProntoNeo.  

 

I AM not a collector. My possessions do not include Depression
glassware, Art Deco matchbooks, vintage postcards or Hummel figurines.
When I die, I will not bequeath any coins, stamps or rare editions.

What I do have, arrayed on the coffee table that stands between my sofa
and my television set, is a fabulous set of remote controls: one for the
television, one for the cable box, one for the DVD, one for the VCR and
two for the stereo system. That's six, plus two more downstairs for the
television and the cable box in the kitchen. The situation was getting
out of hand.

Then I heard about ProntoPro NG. Made by Philips, ProntoPro NG (for
"next generation") is a touch-screen device that promises to take couch
potatoes to the promised land of truly universal remote control. With
the right customizing, using the ProntoProEdit NG software, the device
can communicate with all the equipment normally found in a home theater,
as well as with electronically controlled lights, curtains and
garage-door openers. Users can program a single button to set off a
sequence of electronic events, like turning on the television, tuning it
to a specific channel, muting the sound, turning on the stereo to top
volume and dimming the lights. With a radio frequency extender, the
ProntoPro can send its signal all around the house.

This sounded like the solution: the Tito who would bring order and
stability to my electronic Balkans, the Esperanto for my Tower of Babel.
The price was breathtaking. At $1,000, the ProntoPro costs more than a
lot of the equipment it talks to. But factor in the lost hours spent
hunting for the DVD remote that someone kicked under a chair or the
television remote wedged deep in the sofa, and the ProntoPro might pay
for itself in, say, a quarter-century or so.

On the debit side, there are the untold hours spent mastering the thing.
About an hour into the instruction booklet, I realized I was in deep
water. Like other universal remotes, the ProntoPro has to learn the
infrared codes for each device that it will be communicating with.
Philips has programmed the ProntoPro with codes for more than 500 brands
but, to my dismay, only a limited cluster of commands for any given
remote. The rest of the functions must be taught to the ProntoPro, one
by one. This is tedious but doable.

The real fun begins when it dawns on you that the many functions on the
typical remote control exist on one page, so to speak. That is, all the
buttons are present and accounted for on one plane. With the ProntoPro,
the commands for each device are spread over several pages, with the
user scrolling up and down to reach the desired button. That makes for a
lot of thumb work, and a lot of time looking at the remote screen
instead of the television screen. It's possible to reconfigure and
reorganize the pages, but that requires a long programming session with
the ProntoProEdit NG software.

It was at this point that I demoted myself to the ProntoNeo. With a list
price of $200, the Neo is Philips's entry-level universal remote. The
screen is black and white, which did not bother me. I care about color
on my television, not my remote control. The layout can be reconfigured
in only a limited way, and the device does not come with a rechargeable
base. But it performs most of the same functions as the ProntoPro.

With my very limited stores of patience and determination, I managed to
transfer most of the commands from my various remotes to the Neo, which,
like the Pro, lets you relabel buttons on the touch screen and maintains
a page of blank buttons on the last page for each device, so that you
can find a place for, say, the zoom button on a DVD remote. The Neo also
allows you to program multiple commands into a single button - as many
as 250 of them.

But I found myself stymied when I tried to make it turn on my DVD
player, then my television, and then run down a small menu on the
television screen to reach the proper setting for playing a DVD. Each
step involves a slight delay. The television takes a little while to
come on. So does the menu. Clicking from one menu choice to the next
takes about a second, but wait too long, and the menu disappears from
the screen.

In theory, this is no problem. The Neo allows you to add a delay between
steps. But I never succeeded in getting the delays to coincide with my
television.

I did feel that the Neo and I were developing a relationship. And then I
dropped it on the floor. It has not spoken to me since.

If you can't drop a remote, or even kick it once in a while, what good
is it?