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...Continued from Page 7.
Button labels...
Unlike iconic-style LCD touchscreen displays, where one is usually able to hide unused buttons or pick from an assortment of labels on each key, One For All treats the Kameleon 8 more like eight separate hard buttoned remotes that have been fused together.
Eight predefined device templates are available on the remote, and it is absolutely impossible to modify those by removing an unused key from view, reactivating a hidden key, or changing a button to one of the other available labels. What you see is exactly what you’ll get.
...And page scrolling.
One of the Kameleon’s more LCD-like concepts are multiple display pages – screens within a device that are flipped through via the [Scroll] button. The “Audio” device has 4 possible screens, “TV” has 3, while “Cable/Sat” and “VCR” each have 2. The scroll button is always visible, even if the component has no other pages to scroll to (as is the case with CD, DVD, PVR and Home Theater).
After some use, the scroll function really begins to feel like an afterthought. For every device except “Audio”, scrolling does nothing more than hide some keys and reveal others. For example, with the TV device the first page has volume, channel, numeric keypad, the 4 outer menu buttons, [Format] and [PIP]. The second page hides [Format], [PIP], [Input] and [Enter] keys, and displays the 5-way directional menu cursor. The third and final page shows everything except for [PIP] and [Format], but adds a different [PIP] button along with [Swap], [Size], [Freeze] and [Move]. None of these newly revealed buttons are in the same place as others.
The Kameleon’s controls are already arranged in a very logical and orderly fashion, so there doesn’t seem to be any sensible reason why the whole lot couldn’t be shown at once. The complicated DVD and Home Theater devices opt to display everything on one screen, so why not others? (To be fair, the “Audio” device does have some duplicate functionality on keys: between the four screens, 14 new functions are added.)
Not only is there no way to disable this “feature” where it isn’t needed or wanted, but One For All has dedicated yet another button to page scrolling: the [PVR VOD/Preset] key, which is only available under Cable/Sat and Audio devices. This button’s sole purpose is to jump to a predefined page – which for the 2-screen Cable/Sat device does exactly the same thing as pressing [Scroll]. A few other automatic page jumps exist, for example pressing [PIP], [Guide] or [Menu] on the TV’s first screen sends the attached command and jumps to the second display page, while pressing [Surround Sound] on the first Audio page jumps directly to the second screen.
Other advanced functionality...
The setup menu’s “Other” option is used to access several advanced customization features not available from the standard setup screen. These advanced items are each assigned a three-digit code – the way absolutely everything is configured on standard One For All hard button remotes.
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