All remotes suck

[coneman5259]

So the other day a buddy and I were watching Netflix at my house on my wii, and he commented on how fast I could find something or go through the menu options and I guess I really didn't notice it. After that day I tried Netflix on my Xbox 360 and my Sony blu-ray player. Horrible. The Xbox isn't too bad but they use a weird preload system so your show starts out at minimum resolution and using the controller to type was taking forever. The blu-ray player was worse, well because it was Sony and because to type anything you had to use a T9 system like how you would text on a phone without a full keyboard.
So I think the main difference is the wiimote, it's insanely easy to use and feels natural, I just point at what I want and click it, I don't have to cycle through all the options.
I want to get an appletv so I can rent movies and for AirPlay but the remote is still just the same old thing, I want a wiimote, that's the future (besides thought control).
Does anybody else feel this way?

 

[tipman2000]

i agree, the problem is that it is cheaper for the manufacturers to make a regular remote, and until they decide to give up a slice of their profits (never), then us consumers will have to go with the cheapest option, which in the case of remotes today, even in 2012, means interfacing via a single red LED to show the remote is working, or choose text via a t9 as you said. then again, it is not that easy to include a full querty keypad in a tv remote when it would rarely be used. for xbox and ps3, they have keypad addons with querty boards. and once again, you could argue that the wiimote is not very good, because while being better than t9, it will never approach how fast you can type on a keyboard. the reality is we are shoehorning today's software onto mostly legacy hardware that is built to do things you could do long ago. 5 years ago there was no netflix on your bd player. tech moves fast. personally, i say leave the text input to computers querty board phones, the game playing to dedicated consoles and computers with gamepads, and leave the movie watching to tvs. sure, an iphone can do games, text, and movies, but quite honestly it is not the best platform to do those things. same with xbox and bd player doing netflix. they werent built to do text entry. i think right now there is this big blurring of the lines between platforms. even phones can play hd video, so the only thing radically different between any two machines with microchips are the form factor. it wont happen for some time but at one point your whole computing experience will be in a smartphone or little device that you simply jack into the tv for games or into the monitor for web surfing and keyboard typing. in fact, we are almost already at that point. the only thing holding us back now is the difference between operating systems. if we can get full windows and OSX on an iphone, most will never need a full computer again.