Digital Trends

Gyration Media Center Remote and Keyboard

May 5th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Our Media Center Remote also suffered from transmission and interference issues. It seemed that whenever our Media Center computer went into suspend mode, the remote wouldn't properly work once we “woke” the computer back up. We found ourselves rebooting way too much. And while the keyboard never experienced any interference issues, the mouse would at times track slowly, inaccurately and choppy, presumably due to some kind of interference. Changing channels on the Remote improved the problem — there are eight available channels — but we still experienced interference at times.

Another annoyance with the use of the remote was that since it is seen by Windows as a mouse, most actions such as using Swipes bring up the mouse control bars — something that a regular remote or the keyboard does not do. This can get annoying when you every movement you make brings a control bar over top of your application.

Also, as you may assume, the gyroscope mouse is a power-hungry device. Both the keyboard and the remote require four AAA batteries each and we found the remote to go through the batteries quicker than the keyboard. We suggest you invest in some rechargeable batteries if you decide to purchase this suite.

Room For Improvement

We tested the Gyration Media Center Remote and compact keyboard on two different Gateway Media Center PCs and a custom-built home-theater PC using Snapstream's Beyond TV 3 HTPC front end. While the remote is pre-configured to work with Windows Media Center Edition only, it can be used — with less options — with regular Windows XP. Unfortunately, the Media Center Home button can't be programmed for any other command so it becomes useless if you don't have Media Center. Of course, the target audience for these devices are owners of Media Center PCs, but being the curious type, we wanted to see how useful they were without Media Center. We would have really liked the ability to customize all of the buttons because the remote could have been very useful with Beyond TV 3, an application that in our opinion is much better than Microsoft's Media Center.

As stated, the remote really could use some improvement. We hope Gyration is working on a replacement for the Media Center Remote and can incorporate some suggestions that we think might be useful.

The remote really could use some more buttons. For comparison, the Media Center Remote has only 15 buttons on the face of it, two of them being mouse buttons. A remote for Time Warner digital cable has 49 buttons and is virtually the same size as the Gyration remote. 

If they shrink the size of the mouse buttons and slightly increase the overall size of the remote, we think Gyration can fit the 10 channel buttons on the Remote. The design of the trigger on the underside of the remote is clever, but it just takes up too much room and makes it awkward to press the other buttons. We think a simple push button flush with the back of the remote, or slightly indented would be a much better design.

There are four navigation buttons near the top of the remote — Record, Back, Forward and Play/Pause. They work fine for watching TV on your Media Center PC and when watching a DVD you can fast-forward and rewind, but there is no Stop button and there is no Next or Previous button — common buttons that are very useful when watching DVDs or listening to music. What's worse, the four buttons aren't even completely useable for music. Only the Play/Pause button works while listening to music. The Forward and Back buttons do not have any effect while playing music. This we found to be totally unacceptable. The only usable buttons while listening to music are the volume and play/pause buttons. This forces the user to use the keyboard or mouse to skip tracks, change tracks, and rewind or fast forward a recording. The keyboard has all of the media controls you could want — but users probably would prefer to use the remote if they could.