I’m not a reflexive royalist, but I’m very much in agreement with Prince Philip on this issue:
The Duke of Edinburgh has launched a scathing attack on the design of television remotes and controls.
The famously outspoken Duke, 88, criticised designers yesterday for making handsets small and complicated and for hiding controls on television sets.
His words gave an intriguing insight into life at Buckingham Palace.
He said: ‘To work out how to operate a TV set you practically have to make love to the thing. And why can’t you have a handset that people who are not 10 years old can actually read.
I’m not much of a TV watcher, so the few times I want to watch something on TV, there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll need to get technical assistance from Elizabeth or Victor. If the DVD player was the last component being used, the cable box may need to be rebooted. Usually, after rebooting, it’ll then need to be reconfigured to work with the TV set. Sometimes, the re-configuration needs to be done 2-3 times before it “sticks”. Even then, sometimes the TV doesn’t get a signal from the cable box, so the cable box has to be unplugged (so it loses its IP address from the cable provider) and then plugged in again (to get a new IP address). Then, if we’re lucky, it’ll connect properly and I can start to find the proper channel . . . it shouldn’t take 5-10 minutes of fiddling to turn on the bloody television!
And that’s ignoring the fact that none of the remotes does everything, so we use the cable box remote for most things, but the TV remote for widescreen/regular format and the DVD remote for pause/eject.
H/T to Elizabeth for the original link.
Update, February 2010: Apparently a lot of our issues were caused by the DVD player. We replaced it with a Blu-Ray player over Christmas, and we no longer have anything like the same sort of hassle. Still too many different remotes, but everything now works.
