OTHER TECH

Proton SRC-2010 The Proton SRC-2010 is a sleek device with a lustrous finish that makes it stand out. It can control 10 devices and provides 12 timers plus 12 macros, each of which can send up to 25 commands. The touchscreen is customizable, and a sensor measures the ambient light so it can automatically turn on backlighting if needed. Unlike the RCA remote, the Proton lets you manually adjust the backlight's turn-on sensitivity and turn-off timing. The eight hard buttons grouped underneath the LCD, assigned to the most frequently used controls, are also backlit.

The remote has two small jacks on its left side, one for DC power and the other for connecting it to a PC with the supplied RS-232 cable. The programming software, which Proton plans to make available free on its Web site, wasn't up yet during our review of the remote.

The SRC-2010's main menu shows a list of available devices, each of which can have its own set of menus, up to four "pages" long, with buttons specific to its operation. The displays are clean, in part because the touchscreen's small size lets you fit only a small number of buttons on each page. The downside is that you might have to scroll through several pages to find the button you're looking for. Buttons can be resized, relabeled, or deleted on either the main menu or the device menus, and buttons on the device menus can be labeled with either text or an icon. The setup menu lets you devise macros (with up to a 15-second delay between commands), set timers, enter learning mode, adjust the display contrast, and so on.

The SRC-2010 was both comprehensive and straightforward. I could set timers to activate daily, on a specific date, on a certain day of the week, on all weekdays, or even Monday through Saturday. Best of all, everything worked very intuitively. The Proton remote was definitely the easiest of the three to use.

One major shortcoming is that it has no preprogrammed commands in memory. All command codes must be learned from your previous remotes, which considerably increases the initial setup time. On the upside, the learning process was simple, if tedious. And, as on the RCA remote, the Proton's learning eye is located in its tail, which let me place the two remotes head to tail instead of head to head, meaning that I could read the labels on both handsets simultaneously - smart. In the end, after relabeling some keys (using a tiny onscreen keyboard), adding some icons from the available selection, and moving soft buttons, I was able to create clean device menus and pages anyone would be able to use easily. It's not something I'd want to do every day, but I found it more entertaining than standard TV fare.

I also checked out an earlier version of the SRC-2010 along with its PC software. The software was intended essentially to duplicate the remote's functionality on a PC, but it also made it much more convenient to configure menus, create macros, create and move buttons, and the like. Better still, it let me back up all of my custom settings to my computer's hard drive.

The optional SDS-2000DBC charging station ($110) is a sculpted base that holds the handset for recharging. Three AAA rechargeable nickel-metal-hydride (Ni-MH) batteries are included. Unfortunately, the remote can't be used during recharging because it points up.