Dave’s coworker is in the market for a new universal remote, so Dave asked me on my thoughts since we own two of them.  I’ve meant to write a review for awhile, so I wrote Dave back and saved a copy for myself to post here.  Dave asked, "What model number is yours and what do you like and dislike about it?"  The following is my reply.

We’ve got 2 of the 688s.  Its the highest end of the b&w display ones and has ‘buttons optimized for a DVR.’  The color ones are 800 series, iirc.

Anyway, I loved it when I got my parents one (partially as guinea pigs) and loved my first one so much we got a second and they replaced both our sony massives.

I can honestly say its the best remote I’ve ever owned.

Pros:

• activity based, so it has buttons like ‘watch tv’ and ‘watch dvd’ and ‘play music’  it so simplfies control that my technology challenged parents and in-laws can handle it.
• has buttons for most every common feature, as opposed to the mostly lcd displays of the old sony.  I can run the remote without looking at it.
• compact size (again compared to our old ones.)  Its about the same size as the tivo peanut.
• 6 buttons with accomping lcd readout to handle functions that there aren’t buttons for.  Also supports multiple pages.  The aiwa receiver in single device mode has 7 screens of these.
• ‘help button’: since the remote tracks the state of devices, it can get out of sync with the devices if an ir signal was missed or a toddler hits a key on the tv.  The help funtionality will try to resend the signals to set the devices how they should be, and then ask you if it fixed it.  If you answer no, it walks through a check of each device asking on its state.  Its awesomely powerful for the clueless.
• can handle fairly complex setups that include items like a/v switches as well as TVs and Recievers.

Cons:

• as with any universal, its sometimes difficult or impossible to do really esoteric funtions on receivers.  However, this has rarely been a problem
• on our model it isn’t supper appearent what the directional arrow buttons are a first.  Minor quibble, but it stumped me for a few minutes, so its worth noting.

Unique item and one of the killer features of the remote that is mostly a pro, but may become a con in the far far future:

• all of the configuration of the remote is done via a website, then a custom build is downloaded to your pc and loaded onto the remote via usb.
• the web site is backed by a huge partially user contributed database.  every device I own, no mater how out of the mainstream (audiotron and radio shack supercheap a/v switch) were already there.  The remote can learn (and it sends the learned items to the db) but I haven’t had to do that except in a few cases where I had to reteach it a button or teach it a button that I use that no one else had added to the db.
• the downside of course is two fold: 1) what happens if the web page goes away and 2) what if they stop supporting my particlar model (the forced upgrade problem.)  I only think of this because as an open source weenie this is always an argument against proprietary software.  🙂