One of the Holy Grails of techdom is the perfect universal remote. To mix my cultural metaphors, technologists have been on a never-ending quest to find one remote to rule and control all your home audio/video gear. Steve Wozniak attempted one called the CL9 and failed, the Philips Pronto developed a cult following but never reached the mainstream acceptance, and there's even a company cleverly called Universal Remote Control that makes some nice universal remotes for the high-end custom installation market.
But ultimately, they all fall short for some or a variety of reasons.
Nevertheless, three companies – Surc, NewKinetix (the RÄ–) and VooMote (VooMoteOne) – have separately figured that the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad would make a perfect platform for a universal remote. Just create an app that contains the command codes for hundreds of makes and models of home A/V gear and on-screen control buttons, and add a clip-on dongle or case with the infrared (IR) transmitter that sends the control commands to your TV, cable box, AV receiver, DVD player, et al, and there ya go.
In theory, a great idea. In execution – difficult.
iPhone as remote drawbacks
iPhone may have plenty of processing power and an iPhone app plenty of programming flexibility to create a powerful and completely customizable universal remote. But the smart phone – in fact, all touch screen devices – suffers from three major universal remote control drawbacks:
Like all touch screen remotes, you can't feel your way around the keypad to locate the right oddly-shaped button as you keep your eye on the device you're aiming it at.
There's not enough screen real estate to display all the relevant controls. You may have to swipe or scroll from the screen with the volume and channel controls to another with the keypad, and another the DVR controls.
The batteries in a standard remote control last for months. An iPhone's battery lasts maybe a day, and are at their lowest power level when you want to use the remote most – after work, prime time.
Bearing these and other inherent flaws (i.e. your screen dimming or the phone/remote going to sleep) in mind, here's short reviews of each of the three iPhone app/remotes mentioned above.
Surc
Of the three iPhone remotes, Surc ($90) is the only case that can worn by your iPhone 4/4S full-time. But once the single-piece form-fitting Surc case is on, it's deuce difficult to get off.
The Surc app is the densest of the three – I found navigating between using the remotes and the editing functions confusing. Like the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II complaining about too many notes in a Mozart opera, IMHO Surc presents way too many options – there are around four DOZEN different button types listed – and the Surc app treats all options, the obvious such as adding or labeling a button as well as the more obscure, with the same weight.
One of these advanced functions is gestures. You can program a control – volume up, channel down, etc. – with 1,2 or 3 up/down/left/right taps or swipes – instead of feeling around for the button. Except I couldn't get any of them to work (not they don't work – they may, I just couldn't figure it out). I also couldn't get pairing, or learning – using your old remote to beam functions into corresponding on-screen buttons on the Surc – to work.
Like all universal remotes, you can mix-and-match different controls from different devices on a single screen, such as the volume buttons of your AV receiver with cable box channel controls, as well as creating "macros" – programming a series of commands, such as turning on or off all your gear with the press of one button. All three of app/remote products excel at creating these one-button macros.
Surc's tag line is "Easy as 1, 2, 3" – well, not really. All these remote products require at least a half hour or not longer of tedious set up, the Surc the longest and most tedious. Great for gadget heads who love to tweak, not so great for the rest of us.
VooMoteOne
Of the three, the VooMoteOne ($100) is the easiest to set up – you get on-screen prompts that walk you through the entire process. I was excited about how easy the VooMote set-up seemed compared to its competitors, until I actually tried it.
First, unlike the other two remotes, the VooMote app did not have the control codes for my Pioneer Kuro HDTV. VooMote's "Teach-In" – the learning function – worked the first time I tried to teach VooMote the controls from my Pioneer HDTV remote control, but refused to work thereafter when attached to both an iPhone 4S and a 3GS.
To help identify which set of IR command codes your device responds to, a pre-programmed remote usually uses the power on/off function as a test command. VooMote, however, uses either volume up/down and/or channel up/down, which are inappropriate for most of the multiple devices you're trying to program (in a basic cable-satellite box/AV receiver/TV set-up, for instance, you neither change channels on your TV nor adjust volume on your cable box). VooMoteOne was annoyingly unable to program the codes for my Panasonic Blu-ray player, which has no volume and channel controls.
VooMote also is the only one of the three that lacks a commands code set for a cable or satellite/DVR combination. You have to add "DVR" as a separate, additional device.
However, VooMoteOne's Create OneView, which guides you through the creation of combining controls from multiple devices, to be the most second-most seamless of the three.
Physically, the VooMoteOne case comes with clips to fit the iPhone 4/4S, the 3GS and the iPod Touch. But VooMoteOne is a bulky, pear-shaped case, too clunky to act as a case full-time. Plus, the bottom piece juts out a bit (it's like wearing a pair of pants two sizes too big), making it awkward to get to the iPhone Home button.
If we could combine Surc's case with a VooMote app that used the power/on-off controls to identify the right set of command codes – now we got something.
NewKintix RÄ–
First off, trying to type that name with the line over the "e" (it's called a "macron") is a pain in the QWERTY. I ended up copy-and-pasting "RÄ–" from the company's Web site and into the copy where needed.
Other than that, the NewKinetix RÄ– was the best all-around of these three app/IR remote choices, notwithstanding the aforementioned inherent touch screen interface issues.
For instance, RÄ– is not a case, it's a dongle, so attaches easily to the 30-pin connector of any iOS device, including an iPad version, which can pack a LOT more commands onto the iPad's larger screen.
Since RÄ– is only a dongle, it's also the cheapest of the three – just $60. Conversely, you'll dis-attach the dongle when you leave the house, which means you have to be careful it doesn't get lost.
Since the RÄ– dongle attaches to the bottom of the iPhone, the RÄ– app opens upside down. Although lacking VooMoteOne's on-screen step-through, I found RÄ– the easiest to create a combined control screen, labeled as an "activity" such as Watch TV, which combines cable box channel navigation with AV receiver volume controls automatically.
Even though RÄ– makes it easy to create the basic functions, it's packed with advanced customization features that are, unlike Surc, safely sequestered under Settings.
Best of all, the control buttons include light, sound and haptic feedback, each of which you can customize. Being able to "feel" that you've pressed a button is a huge bonus for a touch screen remote.
RÄ– also makes it easy to transfer your carefully created controls and settings to another iOS device via the Bump iPhone app or emailing them to the RÄ– app on another iPhone, a nice touch.
In conclusion…
Personally, I'm perfectly content with the expansive remote control my cable monopoly provides for most of my multi-device power/volume/channel-surfing control needs. To me, Surc, VooMoteOne and RÄ– are interesting and clever, but ultimately hampered by iPhone's inherent remote control drawbacks.