A few comments, questions and a bit of an early review from a new user...

Per the earlier feedback from the Philips team, I recently purchased this remote, fully expecting to be able to use it to browse and play media stored on a Mac, even without a separate UPnP media hub, like Streamium. As I understood the Philips claim, the RC9800i, itself, could function as a media rendering device and access content served by the included Philips Media Manager software. Thus far, this does not appear to be the case.

I recall Daniel, earlier, alluding to the fact that, in his experience, a physical media hub was in fact required, in order to even enable this kind of "browse and stream" functionality on the remote; he reasonably attributed this to a beta sotware limitation. Since I purchased the unit, only today, and I've downloaded the most recent software, I guess I'll either have to assume that I'm a paying beta customer; that I'm missing some critical step in my configuration; that the software will be updated, shortly; or, that the functionality was misrepresented in the first place. Anyone have any insight into which is the right answer?

Couple of other things I've also noticed:

(1) When setting up a second room that has an identical cable box to a prior one, the RC9800i correctly asked if I wanted to use the prior configuration of the device, already stored on the remote. The idea, of course, is to save setup time, and I promptly answered "yes," only to discover that no activities were presented for this second room that actually included the cable box as part of the mix: only one, isolated, "watch TV" activity was made available for OTA broadcasts, even though the room had both a cable box and tv, clearly defined. In order to get a "watch cable" activity to appear, I needed to recreate a duplicate of the original cable box, repeating the same device setup steps and using a different name. Curious, but seems to be a bug in the current firmware.

(2) Ability to rename user-defined buttons is missing. I know this has been reported, before, but it really should elicit an enhancement in the next software release. Also, in some cases, like when an activity only requires a single device (i.e. listening to FM stereo), the device functions are consolidated to a single page and, as a result, user-defined buttons are not available.

(3) Unable to get multi-room functionality working on my HK AVR-335. Unfortunately, it does not appear like HK defines distinct code sets for multi-room functionality. Instead, you can purchase a separate IR interface that plugs into a "multi-room" port in the receiver; this interface translates the standard HK set of codes, emitted from any remote, into multi-room actions. Without this interface, the primary HK remote works in tandem with the receiver to establish a binary multi-room state, such that certain keys are interpreted as multi-room actions when this state is active. This kind of two-phase mode seems difficult to support on any universal remote, especially those with limited programming capabilities, like the RC9800i. I suspect a more programmable option, like the Pronto TSU7000, might be able to manage this better, however.

Overall, the remote has a clean appearance and form factor; it's much smaller than I would've imagined. Of note, the EPG feature is nifty, though perhaps a bit more flash than usefulness, since most cable and satellite providers already offer a guide as part of their services. If a few critical enhancements can be introduced, along with some bug fixes and the advertised remote-centric "browse and stream" functionality, the RC9800i would appear to represent a nice option for those who want a premium remote with an easier, less programming intensive, user experience - especially if compatibility with networked UPnP components fits into your plans. Hopefully, Philips won't drop the ball on these and other open issues and will keep users informed, while addressing them in a timely manner.

Gary