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PRODUCT REVIEW
New weapon in the remote control wars
By Michael Compeau
Forget about the teen scene and the thousands of Generation Y kids battling in lunchrooms over whether the Handspring Visor or the Palm m100 is the "organizer de rigeur" this fall. It's irrelevant. The real story is unfolding in home theaters and living rooms across the globe. Home theater purists are waging their war with Palm device zealots intent on infiltrating the hallowed domain of the URC (Universal Remote Control) thanks to Pacific Neo-Tek's OmniRemote application. The battle reports are regularly posted at a fascinating (and tremendously useful) Web site called RemoteCentral.com at http://www.remotecentral.com.
Our heroes
Throughout a thread aptly titled "PalmPilot is an excellent Universal Remote Control," at http://www.remotecentral.com/cgi-bin/mboard/rc-remote/thread.cgi?45, Peter Sharpe and his comrades GregoriusM (Greg Mitchell) and PDD (Paolo Dominguez) fairly bubbled over with the advantages of their favorite PDA's secret double life. They mentioned its ability to store whole databases of their video, DVD, and CD collections. They traded favorite Web sites for use with AvantGo to pull down movie reviews onto their Palm devices for immediate reference while browsing DirecTV listings. And they talked price. Incredibly low price, since, when compared to the cost of other touch-screen universal remotes, the price of a Palm m100 or Visor Solo is little more than pocket change.
And who are our heroes' foes? The stick-in-the-mud purists who, well, just don't get it. The detractors mustered all the ammunition they could find "OmniRemote's only got six buttons," the traditionalists whined; "Yeah, and the beam is too narrow," the negativists chimed in. It was incredible. I enjoyed a solid two hours of great entertainment reading through the message threads on RemoteCentral!
By far the most common product compared to the OmniRemote solution is the Philips Pronto, pictured in Figure A.
FIGURE A
 
The Philips Pronto is OmniRemote's most common challenger. Roll over picture for a larger image.
The Philips Pronto could easily be mistaken for an ill-fated Windows CE device. Mistaken, that is, until you use it. This one is a whole lot easier to use and does what it's supposed to do tremendously well. However, it costs $399. Given the $400 to $700 paid for competing URC products such as the Philips Pronto and Sony AV2100, you'd do a lot better with a lower-end Palm device or Visor for only about $230 including software.
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