First of all, thanks to David D'ARCHE for prompt delivery! Here are my first impressions from a few days of playing around with it.

Hardware-wise, it is an impressive piece of equipment. Rather than extolling its virtues, however, I will concentrate on its shortcomings - which may be more interesting to potential buyers.

I bitterly bemoan that Philips has removed the capability of uploading from the control unit to the PC. They say this protects the work of custom installers. Maybe that's true, but I would have preferred to retain this as an optional. Obviously, I am not a custom installer!

That the device connects to a Wifi net, yet does not incorporate a browser, is a major disgrace. There is absolutely no excuse of any kind that Philips did not provide a browser! This is entirely ununderstandable!

Apart from the above, the device is highly functional and just fine. I hope that the 2100 mAh Li-ion battery has a long life, but I hadn't yet enough time to find out.

The software, on the other hand, is a dog! For one thing, it is amazingly slow. That applies to everything: installing, loading, saving and retrieving files, etc. No idea in which language it was written and how it was compiled. I have never seen any kind of software that is that slow (including Visual Basic stuff).

Another annoyance with the software is that it does not adhere to standard conventions. The way you select graphic items is non-standard: you cannot simply draw a rectangle to select a bunch of included items. Also, there is no way to shift items along perfectly horizontal/vertical lines (any other graphic package will do so by pressing Shift). There are many more inconveniencies with the software which drive me up the wall - but what can I do?

On the plus side, the software appears to be stable. I didn't experience any crash - yet. Not even with the device simulator, which was notoriously "crashy" in other Pronto software versions.

All in all, I am satisfied with my purchase. It is a good item - and it could be much better if Philips had consulted me before releasing it :-)

All the best
AAG

aag,

FYI, VB is only slow if the folks writing the code don't understand real-time programming. I've got a PC Media player that I wrote that talks to the TSU9600 just like an Escient E2 and it's written almost (except for the skin layer) completely in VB and it blows the doors off my Escient DVDM-100 when it comes to responsiveness.

Not to mention the fact that it's running on an Epia Via Mini ITX machine with a Cyrix 800 Processor, 256MB of RAM, and Windows XP to boot.

Maybe not standard conventions but have you even read the help file for multi-select using Shift and Ctrl click options? There are alignment capabilities as well that you say are just not there. Might be worth a read.

Not intending to flame or incite riot here, just point out that your initial impressions state that capability is not present that is really there, if not in the manner you are used to finding.

Welcome on board.

Dear Lyndel, well taken! My wife also always complains that I don't read manuals - which inevitably leads to trouble...

On the other hand, thirty-eight years after man has gone to the moon, we might expect that any software (as well as any kind of appliance) be self-explanatory!

Matter of fact, I did spend some 2 hrs on the manual (which is exceptional by my standards). I still can't find any alignment guides. I know that you can align selected items, but what I meant is moving along horizontal/vertical planes, which is easy in PowerPoint, Photoshop, CorelDraw, etc. etc. I may still have missed it though...

cheers
AAG

I'm quite surpised you think it is slow. I haven't found anything slow at all.

If you are referring to "Planes", might that be what is described as ZOrder? Sending To Front/Back, etc?

If so, there are keyboard shortcuts Shift PageUp/Down and Shift Up/Down to

Bring To Front/Send to Back and
Bring Forward/Send Backward.

There are right-click options as well as a toolbar for this functionality as well.

As far as an excellent manual, there were several things that were unclear in the manual and I personally submitted over 100 change requests for the doc during the beta test.

As I said before, the software is not a graphical editor nor is it powerpoint. If you've used the NG-based editors before, then there should be little, if any, learning curve.

If this is your first time using a Philips remote editor package, I'd expect that you might have some comments like this.

Once you get used to it, there are some nice features such as F2 and F7. Daniel, Peter, myself, an others were pretty critical about keyboard shortcuts with the Pronto Team throughout all the editor development. I personally think that what we have now, compared to 3-4 years ago, is 1000% better. However, I do admit that there is room for improvement.

Also, I take it you are not an installer. This remote is more complex than previous remotes as far as capability. Dave D'Arche did a good job of explaining the NG remotes in the Ultimate Pronto Guide and alot of what's there applies here.

Once again, welcome on board.

You mentioned it does not upload the ICF from the unit any more to the PC? Does this mean I can not build my ICF, then download it to the device. Learn some buttons with other remotes to my theme, then upload the ICF back to my PC to save and keep working from???

The "learn" process is still available, but works differently. You "learn" IR codes with the Pronto connected to the PC, so the codes are automatically loaded into, and saved on, the PC itself.

If the PC and your other equipment aren't co-located, there's some "sneaker-net" action necessary, but it does work, and it saves the need to remember to Upload the learned codes.

-d-

It's actually an XCF.