Isn’t it great when your SigOther decides that you really need to pick up a new gadget? My wife recently got sick of keeping 2 remotes around while watching DVDs and signed off on the idea of buying a universal remote. I picked up this one, the Universal Remote Control URC-300 “Customizer” (whew!), which was a steal at $50 on Amazon. After a few weeks with it I thought I’d bless my vast audience with a review.

The pros:

• If you’re patient and your equipment supports discrete on/off and input codes you can make it dirt-simple to perform any entertainment-center-related activity.
• It’s really nice to have a touchscreen with customizable labels. This beats trying to remember that, say, the “info” button is actually the “program” button.
• It’s also really nice to have hard buttons for the majority of operations (like play, stop, volume, channel, etc.).
• Build quality is really good. It feels way solid.
• Great value at $50.
• The documentation is actually legible, not Japanese Engrish.

The cons:

• The programming interface is bad in some very frustrating ways.
• There’s no PC programming interface, which is acceptable at $50 but unacceptable at the original retail price (I think it was $200).
• You have to look at the touchscreen to use it.
• The touchscreen button labels can only contain 5 characters, all-caps. Ouch!
• The thing is somewhat “learning impaired” with certain remotes.
• It has hard buttons for ff/fr but lacks hard buttons for fw/rev skip.

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