The man stick

So I recently got a new remote (again). I'm on the hunt for the remote which meets the wife's needs of simple, comprehensive and still comfortable to hold (ie. not a brick). As a guy, I'm perfectly fine with an assortment of remotes on my coffee table, that's why I have a table. The wife is not, and wishes simplicity - I crave flexability.

I thought I'd slayed the beast with the Sony remote I purchases a few years ago. It's got a few buttons, not complicated and has a touch screen which is customizable. It's more a table remote, so it's not all that easy to hold in your hand but it's ok. The pic on the left is what the remote looks like. The size is about to packs of cards next to each other.

So while cruising my favourite deal site redflagdeals for interesting coupons, I found that Dell was having a sale on Logitech Harmony remotes. I've heard lots of positive things from people at work and they seem to get good press and reviews from lots of people on the 'net. So I scored on for about $120 which is cheap considering these puppies got for $200+. I got the 880 model which has a colour screen, more hard buttons (which the wife likes as the touch screen wasn't what she liked for common operations), and is rechargeable. Programming the Logitech 880 is pretty easy; just hit the website, enter all the model numbers for all your equipment and it finds the codes, downloads them and puts them onto your remote. The thing that makes this remote slick is that you don't work with 'devices', you work with 'activities'. So the remote shows 'watch PVR' or 'Watch DVD'. You choose what you wish to do, and it figures out what to turn on, off and change inputs etc to set it up. Then the remote provides control of all the needed functions. So if you're watching a movie, volume is controling your amplifier, play/pause hits the dvd player etc. So far it's working well, and the wife is warming to it :) Yeah!