On October 18, 2015 at 18:50, gerard143 said...
personally I feel a hard button remote with an touch lcd is the best solution in an area that will have a lot of watching hours racking up.
Exactly. I think the touchstone here is this: will someone use the remote so little that they have to look at it anyway, or learn it so well that they can use it by feel?
having a touch only is pretty gay and here is why.
You didn't explain how that has anything to do with gay.
With a hard buttons you really do learn the remote quite well with time and you don't have to even look at it to perform common tasks like volume up/down, ch +/-, pause/play/fwd/rwd. You can pretty much nail it every time without looking.
That is true and there's another issue. Take the humble DirecTV remote (the older white ones) or a TiVo remote. On that one surface you have not only the cursor pad, but also transport controls.
On a complete touchpad you might have the cursor pad off-screen, but not the transport controls. And on remotes such as URC, the transport controls have been harder for me to learn than on a DirecTV remote. I can't tell you why. The Marantzes laid out like the RC5200 had a cursor pad offscreen, but again, you had to have the transport controls on another surface.
Having to look down at a touch screen all the time for the proper button is not imho the best user experience.
It is definitely the best user experience for, say, a conference room where nobody is going to learn to operate the remote without looking! In fact it will probably be easier to use there than a button-only remote. When there's precious little touchscreen, it only gets used for oddball or real important stuff.
I have also lost much interest in using ipads over control manufacturer branded touch screens. By the time I deal with keeping ipads charged, the mounting frame (and most mounts aren't as nice as flush looking in the wall as the dedicated touchscreens and that's big to me I like a flush clean look) the costs are almost right in line with a dedicated screen. Depending on the mount and charging solution it could be more. Then add in setup time and zero margins and how ipads won't automatically wake when you walk up to them. Then the constant resolution changes and programming work required to accommodate all them... I've pretty much written them off. I am happy with RTI's in wall solutions and the variation in sizes and i'd pick them over ipads for sure in most situations.
Yeah, iPads are squeezed into those applications. They're not a good fit.