Well, dear AVS'ers, I've certainly managed to hijaak another thread long enough, and there's no nice place for me to keep rambling on about my new toy, so let this serve as a dumping ground for all things Nevo Q50.
So far it's been a tremendous amount of fun tweaking the hell out of it. Multi-sends per button have proven to be painless, allowing me to evertime I select, say, BD playback, the device sends a pseudo macro of a signal to my AVR to switch input, my Monoprice box to switch HDMI, and my Zektor to switch 5.1 analogue (that's using the read signal from the AVR, but that's another story).
It's quick, the buttons feel -great-, and it's exactly what I've been hoping for all these years, a touch screen remote with buttons aplenty for those things that you simply don't want/need for touch.
There have been a couple hiccups on the learning curve, including a seemingly hidden feature to allow for passthrough from the master page (thank you Mr. NYC!). Setting up for general use was done in minutes, the last few days (and no doubt weeks upcoming) spent on simply finding better, simpler ways of getting the job done. For example, I had originally created all my network icons as individual buttons, rather than a single button with the station logos as transparent PNGs that I could then overlay as a symbol.
I may use 10 guage Home Depot extension cord for my speaker wire as I'm entirely skeptical of much of the sillyness of this hobby, but it's certain that no device is used quite so often and repeatedly as your system remote. I toyed with Harmonies and found them too hard to customize, frustratingly making all the decisions that -I- want to make (reminds me of Macintosh, but that's another story...
). I've fondled Crestron systems, far more hardcore than my simple theatre room needs. I tested out prontos, and found them either hard to handle one handed for the button versions, or with the all touch versions the same old problems regarding the lack of tactile feedback for those functions most used. Even the early Nevo had too few buttons to make a go, and stories regarding battery life and flaky wifi left me wanting. In short, the Q50 seems to hit all the right buttons! (oh, *gag*...)
I look forward to exploring the videos online and to making the most out of my 16 colour screen - it's a nice challenge for a designer to make things look good with gradients, noise, etc., but it's pretty damn easy using bold colours to make some mighty fine icons.
At any rate, here's hoping the mods could move some of my ramblings from the other thread into here, and others can share their own stories of this lovely little magic wand. In a hobby that surely owes quite a bit to fallacies (ahem), it's nice to see a little thing you hold in your hand give so much pleasure.
(god, it's getting worse... sorry about that - Ed.)
