Pros: Elegant solution for iPhone addicts
Cons: programming and setup can be painful
I always have my iPhone on me... it's in my pocket or sitting on the nearest flat surface. When I feel like listening to some music or watching the TV, the last thing I want to do is hunt around for the remote, get within infrared range and point. The RedEye Remote let's me use my WiFi wireless network ANYWHERE in my house and control my equipment truly remotely. That's especially great when you've got your house wired for speakers, and you're upstairs in the spare room sorting your sticker collection.
There are two parts: a hardware piece that you plug into the wall nearby your equipment within infrared range. The second piece is an application that you download to your iPhone or iPod touch. Once everything is up and running, it's brilliant to be able to whip out my iPhone and turn on my favorite radio station or fire up iTunes (via apple TV) from whatever room I find myself in at home.
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This is where it gets a little too complex. The application is frankly a bit of a pain to set up... I wish the guys at ThinkFlood would follow Logitech's lead (in principal NOT execution) of setting up a remote by picking devices from a search rather than "training" it with your old remotes. It takes 15-20 clicks to adequately set up a single function of a single device. Granted, you only go through it once, but it's still way too complex, laborious, and whenever you make an error or something goes wrong, it's a lot of work to go back and re-set it all up.
In my humble opinion, what's needed is a large database of infrared codes, a simple way to load your devices up on the application, then a simple way to arrange and orchestrate the devices to get the behavior you want from your home theater. I hope they'll take on this admittedly weighty burden and find a way to build it into their software or at least make an iPhone optimized website that one can search for devices, set them up easily, and then load them onto the RedEye Remote Controller.
I just downloaded the update... not sure how I missed that. I'll update this again once I have the chance to try out all the new stuff!
***UPDATE***
First, hat's off to ThinkFlood for doing a great job in adding automation to downloading infrared codes and pre-built templates for many activities. I installed the new software, updated my RedEye transmitter with a firmware update, and I was off to the races pretty quickly in adding my devices. I chose to do a factory reset and start over from scratch.
When I went to add devices, I could pick from a list of manufacturers, then pick the device from the list and it conveniently added the codes. This is especially time-saving for products like Tivo and AppleTV that are multi-functional from the ground up with complex interfaces and multi-tiered menus. I was able to add almost everything automatically, but the database lacked codes for my NAD equipment, which was a little inconvenient.
There were a couple of trouble spots for me even with the products available in the database. I've got a Samsung LCD panel, and that manufacturer was on the list. When I picked Samsung from the RedEye iPhone software, there were no devices to choose from, but it nevertheless downloaded a generic basic set of codes that covered most of the TV's operation. So far so good. My problem started when I needed to add commands for switching to specific inputs--for example, my AppleTV is on HDMI-1 while my Tivo is on HDMI-2, and my DVD player is on the Component inputs. So to set up an activity (like watch TV) I need to be able to tell my TV to switch it's input from wherever it may be receiving now to receive Tivo input on HDMI-2.
On my Samsung, to switch inputs, you use the supplied remote to navigate through a tiered menu from which you pick the input you want; their remote doesn't have the command to make the TV switch directly to a certain input using a single button click. That meant using the supplied remote alone, I didn't have a way to send a single signal to send to my RedEye transmitter to train it to just go to a particular input. Fortunately, I have an old Logitech Harmony 880 remote that DOES have those "single button click" codes so I used it to train my RedEye. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have access to my Harmony.
The other glitch came when I was setting up activities. To create an activity, you add actions from your devices in a stack like "do this, then this, then this". Once you've added all of your actions, the culmination of all of those actions is that your equipment is set up to do whatever activity you're looking to do, such as play xBox or watch TV. The problem is that this stack isn't editable, you can only add to it, but sometimes the equipment you have has response lag times in accepting new commands (at least mine does). So creating the activity was a trial and error process--one made very painful by the fact that the stack of actions was not editable in any way. In order to make a change, I had to delete the whole activity and start over.
And this leads me to the final problem with set up...the iPhone interface isn't really designed in a device-aware fashion. It doesn't take advantage of any of the iPhone's unique interface possibilities, and it's way too what I call "blind hierarchical" in it's execution. In other words, you don't have a good idea of what choices lie behind the next available choice, and the interface doesn't help you understand the structure of the data you're creating. To get it to work, this interface requires a lot of walking the hierarchy of the menu system. It can get seriously repetitive and painful when you've got multiple devices in multiple rooms. Still, once I figured out the right order, the activities worked as planned.
The final issue I experienced was that the iPhone software is a bit crashy still. It quit several times over the hour or so I spent setting stuff up. I'm pretty sure ThinkFlood is well aware, however, and will be fixing them.
In general, this latest release for RedEye fixed a huge number of issues and made tremendous strides to automating the device setup process. Kudos on that progress as it goes a long way to making it a brain-dead simple replacement for your hardware remotes. But it's not perfect yet. They need to spend some time re-doing the user experience on the iPhone application, and they need to keep working on the bugs. I think it's still the best approach to universal remote I've seen in ages, and I know it'll just keep improving over time.
