No they are not "global" I personally think this is very good. If you want you all to be the same then programming can accomplish that easily enough. By leaving it up to the user it essentially mutiplies the number of hard buttons by however many devices you have. As a matter of fact this is how I've designed my NCF. Most of the buttons on the touchscreen that I use everyday are jumps to other devices so the hard buttons behave differently. For instance, PVR changes all the hard buttons to control digital video recording and then dish would change the buttons back to control the guide functions. I usually have three or four jumps that are on my frequently visited pages. The pages usually have four buttons of helpful everyday buttons specific to the device or activity. Bottom left and right are larger and can be operated with out looking like a hard button. For the dish guide page, for instance, the left bottom of the screen is guide and the right bottom is exit.