While looking for interesting items for our newsletter, I came across a smart remote control on Kickstarter that has already garnered over half a million dollars in pledges for the Sevenhugs Smart Remote campaign. Could that be the ultimate replacement for all those remote controls presently in my home?

I have a drawer in our living room where I keep the remote controls for all the devices in the room: the TV set, the surround sound receiver, the Blu-ray player, the media player, the set-top box and so on. I think there are about eight remote controls in total, and my wife goes nuts every time she wants to control something. Over the years I have tried a variety of universal remote controls, but none of them was entirely satisfactory. Either they did not work with all my devices, the battery went dead all the time, they did not have enough buttons for all the necessary functions, or the labels were so confusing that after a while I didn’t know which function I had programmed for which button.

In the end, I stopped looking for the perfect remote control. And then I saw the Smart Remote on Kickstarter. The features of this remote control are almost too good to be true. You can point it at a device and it knows which buttons to show on the display for controlling the device. According to the makers, it can control everything (but is that really true?). I would like to try it, but the recommended retail price is $299 and that’s a bit too much for me. Of course, there is still an early bird offer for $149, but even then I think it’s a lot of money for something that I am not sure will meet my requirements. I’ll wait a while until there are some reviews from users. Otherwise it would simply join the collection of remote controls already in the drawer, and my wife would have absolutely no idea which one she should use.