17 out of 17 people found this review helpful.
Save your marriage with a Pronto!
Date of Review: Jul 7, 2000
I travel a lot and we have a pretty complex home-theater/stereo system, and with a total of 8 remote controls the system was quite complex to use. I would often receive desperate phone calls from home: "the TV is just snow" or "I can hear the sound, but the screen is blank" or "the TV is on but the sound is from somewhere else". This went on for a few months and my young lady was getting progressively more agitated with the complexity. She started dropping subtle hints such as "I hate this system" or "my old stereo was easier to use" (her old stereo had a built in 8-track which shows her interest in consumer-electronics was not that high).
I read about the new wave of sophisticated remotes - some costing as much as $1000 per unit controlled (bit rich for me). I saw the Harman-Kardon remote, but it seemed clunky and the early reviews were not glowing. Then I read about the Pronto - sounded pretty good. The completely soft controls would mean not just the replacement of all the remote controls with one integrated one, but that the device could be programmed so that a single button could control many functions. Perfect. I ordered one.
My young lady thought I was crazy - the Pronto cost about $400. But I was on a mission to save our relationship so cost was no object!
The manual was dreadful - no idea what they were talking about. Plugged it in to the computer - it had no pre-set codes at all!?!? So I started to train it - went pretty quickly when I worked out how to do it. The computer interface made the experience quite simple.
Tried out the programming I had created in the device - awful. Well, back to the drawing board.
After about 1 month of occasional experimentation, reading, downloading other peoples codes, I got it to work really well. The Pronto has made the home theater quite simple to use; one button to turn the system on and off, the buttons are all meaningful with (gasp) words on them! It is great - a true boon to our home.
The manual could be improved, the website is OK (why do we have to log in?), the device could come with some codes and predefined screens so the instant gratification could be higher, but overall the Pronto is quite brilliant.
Marriage saved.
