Android tablet and media center

Read the threads regarding "iRule", "Roomie", "Touchsquid" and others. All are tablet based remotes.

Personally I was going to avoid the tablet based remote because I wanted physical buttons for certain things like volume and play/pause, but the Harmony 1100 was the only one (cheap enough) that I found. Problem with that is that Harmony doesn't allow for macros. I needed a whole string of things to be done with certain button pushes and eventually feedback from certain devices (i.e., volume and input setting from the receiver or chapter and time from the BluRay).

I bought the basic license from iRule and have it running on my Droid X phone. It took me a little bit to "figure it out", but I have all the basics down now and am currently building remote screens for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus that I will be buying. For me the phones are too small and the full sized tablets are too big. The 7" tablet is just right for me and they offer a dock for it as a charging station.

You will also need a few other pieces like a Global Cache interface box and a computer network with router.

My son has the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 and he has the factory remote program on it. It was easy to add our cable box to it and it worked as a IR line of sight remote, BUT ..... further than 10' and it doesn't work anymore (terrible range on the IR transmitter). That and the fact that you can't program macros or do anything custom, and that feature lost it's coolness factor for me. But the form factor of that size tablet works for me and I will be using a 7 Plus for my remote. The Droid X phone works, except the darn phone wants to switch back to 3G instead of the wireless connection. Everytime that happens I have to exit iRule, toggle the wireless off and back on, and launch iRule again. The tablet wont have the radio on it so it will always be on the network.