Projectors Reviews, price and comparision

As other technologies have become more powerful and more user-friendly, the TV has been woefully ignored. Hardware gets better, sure, but the user experience—currently involving a plethora of remotes, nameless buttons, and guides that worked when you had 13 channels, but are now impossible with 300—is long overdue for an upgrade. The Peel Universal Control ($99 list), an app and hardware add-on for iPhone and iPod touch, is that upgrade, offering an incredibly easy-to-set-up universal remote for all your home theater components. It also provides a better way to navigate and discover content you'll actually want to watch. While it's not your typical stand-alone universal remote, the Peel wins our Editors' Choice.

Design
The Peel consists of three pieces. First, there's a mobile app that's currently available for iPhone and iPod touch (the company has said Android and iPad versions are coming soon). The app is the controller for the whole system, and for your TV. Then there's the Peel cable, a 10-foot black cable that plugs into a power outlet and into your Wi-Fi router's Ethernet port. Peel includes this cable so that you don't have to deal with connecting the system to Wi-Fi networks, entering passwords and finding IP addresses—just plug it in to your router, and it works.

The third piece is the Peel Fruit, which is a plastic yellow and black pear-shaped infrared blaster, powered by a C-size battery, that sends the Peel's commands to your home theater components. You'll need to store the Fruit where it has a line-of-sight connection to your setup, and it needs to be less than 25 feet away from the Peel Cable—the two communicate using ZigBee, a basic, low-power wireless protocol. That means the Fruit will likely need to be on your coffee table or somewhere similarly conspicuous, but it's more curiosity than an eyesore.

Setup
The set-up process could hardly be simpler: download the app (free in the App Store), plug in the Peel cable (though the app will remind you to do that if you forget), and fire up your iOS device. As long as you're connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the Peel cable, the Peel will connect immediately. Then you'll be prompted to connect to the Peel Fruit using a unique ID that's inside the Fruit (it unscrews to reveal the code, and so you can replace the battery).

Once the three Peel parts are talking to each other, it's time to get your home theater components in the game. That part's easy, too: it involves just tapping and pointing. (A note, though: Make absolutely sure that the Peel Fruit has a direct line of sight to each component—not necessarily head-on, but any solid objects between them will disrupt connection.) Tap the brand of your TV, and the device will attempt to turn on your television by firing every code it can think of. If it works—and it worked every time for me, on multiple different televisions, in my tests—then it's done and will control your TV's functions with on-screen buttons. If it doesn't work (Peel President Bala Krishnan told me more than 97 percent of home theater devices are already supported), you can submit your device's information to Peel, and the company will update its database within four hours. The Peel took a page from the Gear4 Unity Remote ($99.99, 3.5 stars) with its simple setup.

Once your TV is done, Peel tries to guess your cable setup. It figures out your location, then your cable provider, then exactly what kind of box you have. It occasionally takes a number of steps, but it's all done through trial-and-error and only involves you hitting a single button and following on-screen instructions. That's what makes the Peel great: there's no manual to follow, and no codes to enter. It's a fast, dead-simple process wherein the Peel figures out which input on your TV a device is plugged into, what kind of device it is, and how to control it. In five minutes, I got the Peel set up with a Sony TV, a Sony Blu-ray player, a Samsung Blu-ray player, a Roku box, and an Apple TV—all without a hitch.

Watching TV
The Peel app, which has been in the App Store since October, has a couple of cool features that don't rely on any Peel hardware. The app was, initially, just a better way to find things to watch on TV. You tell the Peel app what kinds of shows you like to watch—comedies, basketball games, and action movies, for instance. You can mark shows as your favorites, or cut them so they're never shown to you. As you watch TV, your recommendations get better and better thanks to Peel's algorithm. When you launch the app, instead of a channel-based guide, you see a list of shows that are on right now that you might want to watch. Alternatively, you can search for a show or movie, and see where and when it's on. Some other devices, like the TiVo Premiere ($299.99, 3.5 stars) and the Logitech Revue with Google TV $299.99, 4 stars) include similar learn-and-recommend features, which is a nice addition to your TV guide. Once you find something with Peel, you can easily share what you're watching on Twitter or Facebook.

With the Peel Universal Control, the app becomes even better. Find programming you want to watch (say, March Madness basketball), and a Watch on TV button shows up. Tap the button, and since the Peel knows your channel lineup, it flips straight to a game. Want to flip between five different games? That's as easy as swiping between a list of games that are on. The Watch-on-TV functionality currently only works with your cable and TV, but Peel is working on integrating DVRs and services like Netflix in order to show users all sources with available content.

For all other functions, the Peel Control is a relatively bare-bones universal remote control, similar to the UnityRemote. There's a five-button, on-screen directional pad that you can use to scroll through menus and channels, or control playback on your devices. All interactions are gesture-based, which is a nice touch: instead of looking down to tap a button in the right place, a swipe up or down on the screen changes the volume. I was disappointed to see that it doesn't make use of the iOS keyboard to save you from tedious on-screen text entry.

Unfortunately, the Peel Universal Control won't let you throw all your other remotes away—for some functions, it's just not capable enough. On devices like a Blu-ray player or your DVR, having only the on-screen, five-way navigation just isn't enough&151;you'll want and need the specialized buttons on your dedicated device remotes. If you really need one remote to rule them all, a Harmony remote like the Logitech Harmony One ($249.99, 4 stars) is your best bet. What the Peel lacks in power, though, it makes up for in convenience—it's incredibly easy to set up and intuitive to use, and once you've personalized it a bit it's an excellent way to find stuff to watch. If you're tired of your TV Guide and of hunting around for inputs and remotes, the $99 Peel Universal Control is worth every penny.