Because my first-generation Pronto is getting old I was looking for a new universal remote, I looked at Philips again. The newer, color, Pronto's are way to expensive for my taste but my eye was caught by the 9800i. Not as configurable as the Pronto, but that is OK with me. Some nice reports in the press convinced me and I bought one yesterday. Time for my experiences after 24 hours...

The Good
Nice screen, light, nice form-factor, EPG is very well done, NTP is a plus, UPnP/streaming is nice. Setting it up was fairly simple. All in all: 8 out of 10 points.

The Bad and the Ugly
The remote is sensitive to bright (sun)light (even inside the house), when doing a "learn". The real pain showed up when I wanted to hook-up my Philips (!) DVDR80 DVDR-player. Wouldn't it be much simpler if Philips put models in their database as well? You could simply choose the right model (dvdr80) and all would be well. I realize it would be almost impossible to cover all brands, but Philips should know Philips...

The learning with my original remote went well. Afterwards, I noticed the color-buttons (red, green, yellow, blue) were on the remote-screen but had no codes under them. Worse, you can't learn these keys: they are on the screen but not functional. On the original remote these keys double with "angle", "zoom" etc. and these keys are on the 9800 and work as color-key. The point is, the color-buttons play a very important role in programming with Guide+ and remebering that "red" is the same as "angle" (whatever) is plain simply bad. You could place them under "user functions" but why are the color key present at all if you can't use them???

Other code-sets for Philips DVDR's also don't have the color-keys mentioned. Should I choose another brand where they are present and completly re-learn it?
Any ideas or do I have to wait for a firmware upgrade??