I love Sony, I hate Sony

You know. It's a love/hate thing. This Christmas the family decided we would get each other consoles. Hey, what's a house with 3 XBox 360s without some more console love? So I would buy the PS3 (and a couple of choice games) for Jenn, she would get me a Wii (plus the proverbial look-like-an-idiot games). I came through on my end, but unfortunately there is no Wii anywhere in Calgary. Anyways, so change of plan and we've bought the PS3 as our "family" present and we'll just fill each others stockings and whatnot with other goodies.

Now here's the kicker (and where my <rant/> begins). I own a Harmony 880. Best damn remote on the planet (well, at the time, the 1000 kicks it's butt). Controls everything. If I want to watch TV, it shuts other devices off; turns on the TV; selects the correct input; and turns on the digital receiver. Switch over to the 360 and it shuts down the digital receiver; turns on the 360; and changes the input on the TV to HDMI. Brilliant.

Then I tried to get it to work with the newly acquired PS3. That was a farce. Guess what Sony decided to do with their console (and I'm only finding this out now). It's a proprietary Bluetooth device (okay, not sure about the "proprietary" part or if it's standard Bluetooth). No Harmony remote (mine or anything else on the market) handles Bluetooth. I mean, why would they? That's a silly technology to support. Everything (and I do mean *everything*) is IR these days.

Sheesh. So basically my "universal" remote handles everything in the house *except* that crazy Sony device. There are some crazy hacks like buying a USB->IR thingy which requires the Sony remote so I would probably end up dropping *another* $200 bucks or something on top of the $400 I paid for the remote in the first place. Not something I'm going to entertain so I guess it's get off my lazy butt and walk across the room to turn the freakin' console on. Sigh.

Thanks Sony.