The remote was shipped on 12/4. UPS guy kind of forgot to deliver it on 12/5 and nobody was home on 12/6 so I only got it on 12/9. Bummer.
Quality In short, I love it. It doesn't look like self-made piece anymore. Visually very high quality plastic, feels very nice.
Performance It seems much better that the original. Seems a lot more responsive. Original had a delay between pressing the button and the response. It seems that it's gone now. The range looks better as well. I had problems with certain place in my living room with the old remote - I had to extend my arm all the way up for it to respond. The new remote works in those places just fine. I'm not sure that the increased performance is due to 4 batteries instead of 3 or some other changes but it's most welcome.
Design The way this remote is designed is that number buttons double as direction buttons. It's quite comfortable in this mode. My setup however is slightly different. My primary activity is Watch ReplayTV, which requires number buttons on both Play and Navigation modes. So I remapped directions buttons to transport control buttons. The only problem is that transport control buttons are a little hard to reach - you have to move the remote in your hand a little. But it in no way ruins the experience; it's rather a minor cosmetic point.
Conversion from the original remote. Once I tried to load the existing profile to a new remote, the software detected new board and told me to unplug it and it changed my web account to a new version. Basically the conversion is pretty simple. In my case however, I had altered some device menus to send several key presses at once. For some reason that didn't work with the new remote. What was worth is that the system didn't point it out; instead I've got totally unrelated non-descriptive errors. It took me quite a while to figure out the problem but once I did it worked like a clock.
Bug? These are two problems I've notice so far:
1. When updating the remote, the program normally saves the state so that once the update is done, the remote has the correct state. Worked fine with the older model but doesn't work with this. It keeps the receiver on but turns other equipment off.
2. A few times, it seem like something got stuck and the remote wouldn't respond to scroll wheel. However once I pressed the wheel or cancel button, it would "wake up".
Overall, I'm extremely satisfied with this model. I think it's A LOT better than the old one. While I've listed some problems I've encountered, all of them are quite minor (to me at least) and most of them will probably be fixed during future updates.
