I just read the review of the MX-1000. The picture looks great: A remote with a large LCD display like the Pronto's, but also with up/down/left/right/select hard.

That is ALMOST exactly what I want! I mean, Pronto is great but it's a pain to have to look at it to be sure of pressing in the right place when navigating DVD menus.

However, aside from the Pronto, it seems all consumer remotes that I've tried or read about do a half-arsed job on the LCD side of things. Maybe they cost less than the Pronto, but I don't care about that.

I mean, what use is an LCD screen if I cannot:

(a) Edit the button graphics to look however I want;

(b) Have as many devices containing as many panels containing as many buttons as the remote's memory can hold.

Pronto lets us do both of these things and without them I would feel very limited, even when designing a remote for just a normal system.

Add this to the fact that only a remote with these two features can do things like store CD listings for CD megachangers (i.e. 300 named discs at the touch of a button) and, well...

...I've love to replace my Pronto with a remote that had more hard buttons, but not at the cost of losing my CD listing and the freedom to create exactly what I want.

I just don't get it. Memory is cheap these days, why is the Pronto about the only device which has lots of memory and doesn't have silly limitations on the number of devices, panels and buttons?

Are the companies making remote controls aware of what the Pronto can do and of the fact that some people actually REQUIRE this of a programmable remote control?

I agree

I've overcome the lack of "feeling" the buttons by standardizing where certain buttons are. For example, on my 2 vcrs, dvd and cd player panels, the Left button is always pause, the Right button is always play, the bottom left of the LCD is always rew, bottom right is always ff, eject is above the left button and stop is above the right button. Combined with the vol +/-, channel +/- and mute, that gives me 80% of what I need without having to look at the remote.

The hard buttons I'd like most would be cursor controls. However, I have emulated most of this by making the left-right keys into cursor left right, and the channel up-down keys into cursor up down, but then had to add an "OK" button to about every panel. Since all my TV channels are accessed via icons, I don't miss the channel up down functionality.