I'm a EE with 26 years of product development experience and it was not difficult for me to conclude very quickly that the ProntoNeo, although conceptually a great idea, is nowhere near ready for sale to the public. In fact, it looks like the vast majority of users of this forum are indeed software engineers or students who are willing to hack in order to make the product work for them. REALITY CHECK PHILIPS: you're not going to pay the bills by targeting this niche.

Until the Philips folks make the investment to develop complete and user friendly remote control encapsulations for the vast majority of home theatre components and provide them to customers in a convenient manner, this device will remain only a concept.

I had envisioned going to the Philips web site; selecting the components of which my home theatre is comprised; downloading them; then arranging them in such a manner as to realize the custom remote control configuration that I want. Furthermore, I expected the remote control to easily support separate configurations for each of the 2 home theatres in my home.

It's blatantly obvious that Philips did little or no market research and it's even more obvious they did no user testing.

As one might conclude, I returned my ProntoNeo to BestBuy. I'll wait, although not holding my breath, until Philips or one of their competitors releases a real full-blown product which is a SOLUTION rather than another PROBLEM.