We?ll talk about the software later on; right now let?s have a closer look at the included remote control:

The two large buttons at the top turn the system on and close the active application. Media player controls are right below them:

Lower still, there is a universal joystick for menu navigation and cursor positioning; frequently used keyboard and mouse actions are duplicated around it:

The top button in the circle switches the joystick between menu navigation and cursor control. Below the joystick there are buttons to eject the optical drive?s tray, to switch between the running tasks (our thanks to the developers for this very useful button!), to cancel an action, and to launch applications from the remote control. The blue button launches a software multimedia shell called iMEDIAN.

Next go volume and channel selection buttons as well as numeric buttons to enter the channel number directly.

A sound mute button is on the left of the volume control. On the right of the channel selection button is a Timer button. Tab and Shift+Tab keys are also available among the numeric buttons.

Three groups of iMEDIAN-related keys are below the numeric pad:

The colored buttons choose the reproduction mode according to their labels, but there are some additional buttons for DVD and Movie modes. In DVD mode you can use the buttons to enter the menu and to change the audio and subtitles language; in Movie mode you can set a bookmark, assign a video frame as an icon for the file, change the screen format (the available formats will be described in the Media Center section of the review), and enter the full-screen playback mode.