Gyration GYR3101US Vista Media Center Remote

by Gyration

Product Details

• Item Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• ASIN: B000N9N1OA
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 4, 2008

Product Description

Gyration Motion Sensing Remote Control Certified for Microsoft Vista Finally, a remote control worthy of your PC connected Digital home! Now you can enjoy optimum control of your entertainment with a combination mouse and remote. Thei innovative remote can eliminate the clutter caused by multiple remotes lying around your coffee table. Convergence and Flexibility PC Entertainment and Home Audio/Video Entertainment have traditionally been separated and enjoyed in different rooms of the house. With the introduction of Microsoft's Windos Media Center software, more and more PC users have been using their PC monitors and their PCs as DVD and CD players. It's changing the way entertainment is enjoyed in the home. To address this convergence, Gyration has created the Ultimate Entertainment Remotethat appleas to both the home A/V consumer as well as the PC enthusiast. The Media Center and PC Untiversal control allows you to control your various home A/V components utilizing its remote

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good media center remote, terrible universal remote, October 28, 2007

By 

Anthony Guselnikov (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gyration GYR3101US Vista Media Center Remote (Electronics)

As far as Windows Media Center remotes go this one is fairly unique. WMC functions are good, remote is fairly responsive and almost quirk free. Mouse control functions is what separates it from other WMC remotes and they work quite well. However, Windows Media Center is designed with the fact that you rarely if ever need use of a mouse in mind, so I only use gyro functionality for closing VMC on rare occasions.

Primary reason I bought this product was because it advertised a programmable learning capability. This is where this remote comes to a grinding stop. First of all, programming anything on this remote is anything but easy. You have to press multiple buttons at the same time and the process is rather more difficult than it should be. Learning function simply doesn't work. When you try to program it the remote is likely to hang requiring you to pull out batteries. The mistakes in the manual are a plenty so that doesn't help either.

All in all I'd say if you are in dire need of mouse functionality on your remote this is the way to go, but if you need a WMC remote, look elsewhere.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Media Center Remote, May 27, 2007

By 

scarbrt "scarbrt" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gyration GYR3101US Vista Media Center Remote (Electronics)

1) Excellent range and response
2) Fully integrated mouse function via "waving" the remote around--this works well (surprsingly)
3) Learning remote

What else could you want?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Almost Perfect Home Theater PC Remote, June 11, 2008

By 

Kevin Stewardson "technophile" (NorCal, Cali) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gyration GYR3101US Vista Media Center Remote (Electronics)

I've built a Home Theater PC build on Windows Vista and have been looking for the perfect remote. Media Center remotes generally only work within the Windows Media Center application which has it's limitations. There are plenty of reasons why you would want to drop out of Media Center like to play a BluRay disc for example which requires PowerDVD 8. So then i thought an air mouse or presenter mouse might be the way to go since it's more universal and works across everything, you'd just need to use the media application controls to control whatever you're watching. I in fact found a few Media Center remotes that had built in trackballs . Those remotes are great except you need a second remote to control all your other home theater items like your tv or receiver.

This was the only remote i could find that did media center, had mouse control and had universal remote control features. In my opinion it's pretty much perfect.

When controlling your home theater pc it uses radio frequency which is both good and bad. Good that it doesn't need line of site and has extended range, bad though because it uses 2.5ghz which is also the standard wifi frequency. If you have an home theater pc, you probably have wifi running to it, but so far i haven't had any issues, i just mention it for awareness.

I found the gyroscopic mouse control to be very easy to use after you use it for the first 10 minutes. It's very accurate and works well, i did have to increase the mouse sensitivity though the microsoft mouse control panel which was easy enough to do.

The remote buttons control media center just fine and also work in PowerDVD for DVD and BluRay playback (though Media Center can playback DVDs natively).

The power button for the Home TheateR PC can be programmed to put your computer into sleep mode so it's almost instant on, you don't need to cold boot it each time which makes your HTPC act more like an a/v component than a computer. No one waits for their DVD player to boot up after all.

The only thing really missing is you can't custom map buttons so if you have like a DVR that you want to control, this will get the basics done for you but any real specialty buttons aren't going to work. But i have it setup to control my TV just fine. The programming is a bit more complicated than it needs to be but getting through it and only needing one remote is worth the pay-off in my opinion.