Why doesn't the Front Row remote have a click wheel?

R-F Wireless Click-Wheel Remote Anyone ?

ATI's Remote is wireless and there's little lag is any there and the batteries last too. My pennnies worth.

Shaz.

PS I was contemplating buying a Mac for frontrow but finding out the remote isn't a clickwheel just killed that idea. Back to my HTPC and Buffalo Linktheater.

Apple doesn't put the clickwheel on devices without a display, so neither the iPod Shuffle nor the Apple Remote have it. The price of the Apple Remote is too low to include a clickwheel trackpad anyway.

Perhaps a future iPod will have whatever wireless protocol that Apple decides will be most useful yet painless, and will be able to provide a clickwheel remote interface. Otherwise, I don't think we'll see it on a remote.

Just a thought that I had a while back that I'd really like to see Apple integrate into future iPod versions. Why can't the iPod itself be the remote control? Instead of a reactive IR remote control like it is today, I'd like to see the iPod download over a wireless link, either Wifi or Bluetooth, an XML file that contains everything that Front Row can 'see'. Then you navigate through the content on the iPod (locally), and when you actually select something, it sends the appropriate command to the host machine.

This would go a long way towards making the iPod indispensable, and would also fix the issues where you're not necessarily able to see the screen in question. This could also work with non Front Row capable machines and would be the perfect tie-in for setups that use Airport Express to stream the music from the office into the living room for example. Also this might be able to get around the current limitations of Front Row like the fact that you can't change an item's star rating.

Obviously there's a lot of work to be done to ensure that the wireless traffic is kept to a minimum (things like updating the iPod display with the current track and the progress meter in the track) so that you don't drain the battery completely and that the updates to the XML description file are as small as possible (you don't want to send the whole file just to increment the play count on a file). But from a practical perspective this should be doable since I use me Treo with a much smaller battery to run the stereo all day long on the weekends via Salling Clicker via Bluetooth. Obviously you don't want to mix in an 802.11b device on an 11g network so for the moment bluetooth is the privileged protocol, but it's really not suited for high bandwidth data transfer (ie moving an XML file over that describes a 5000 song library and weighs in at several megs) so you have to work out the tradeoffs on that front - syncing when the iPod is docked and incremental updates thereafter perhaps?

My 2 cents...

A click wheel would make the remote unwieldy and probably lead to decreased battery life---most of the dvd remotes that have a "wheel" functionality are still an on/off toggle--it's just that it has multiple levels of stepping to accomodate different speeds of rewind/fast forward. A clickwheel like an ipod wouldn't really work in the same way. I think that would most likely add too much complexity to the interface when you get right down to it--you don't want a remote to be too complex! If you read the article on simplicity posted yesterday (or perhaps the day before) it makes it obvious that the remote's pretty well thought out as it is. If you need any real evidence of that, find an eldery person and hand them the apple remote and see if they can manage front row. I'm pretty sure that they can. That's the test I use most of the time--if my grandparents can use it without a manual or instruction from me, then the design is GOLDEN.

The apple remote passed that test with flying colors.

Hmm. I can't agree with the IR, battery, OR direction-of-pointing arguments, simply because there are plenty of remotes out there that have the functionality of the clickwheel. For instant, many DVD player remotes have a wheel to enable back-and-forth play.

I hate to schill but...

www.maccontrol.com

We have a remote with a scroll wheel that works over Wifi. It controls your Mac, and your home theater.

I totally agree with the IR argument, the battery argument, and even the direction-of-pointing argument; but how has the massive cost difference between a click wheel and a simple 6-button pad not come up yet?

Then again, since people think iPods should have WiFi and video cameras and 5" touchscreens without being any more expensive than they already are, I'm not sure I should be surprised.

I hate the click wheel, so I'm very happy there isn't one on the remote. I always end up clicking when I don't want too when scrolling through lists on my iPod. (>_

Yeah, next gen bluetooth iPod? I doubt it, but it would be cool.

As for bluetooth remotes, if Apple had 20,000 units made, they surely wouldn't be particularly expensive per unit?

I'd like to actually use an iPod to control front row and have the cover art show on iPod much like the way Salling Clicker works.