Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you want to pause your movie, you hit "Pause". If you want to start your movie again, you hit "Play". But between the "Pause" and "Play" buttons is "Stop". Here Be Dragons. "Stop" means it. "Stop" doesn't just stop the video from playing, it quits out of the Blu-Ray player and returns you all the way to the root PS3 menu. To start watching your disk again you need to select the Blu-Ray disk again, wait for it to boot up, wade through whatever previews and coming attractions are on the disk, re-enable the correct subtitles and menu settings, wait for the various FBI and MPAA warnings, locate the place where it stopped playing, and then resume watching. Hitting "Stop" whether you wanted to or not means you're going to spend at least the next five minutes not watching your movie. The "Stop" button is so big and so centrally located that I can't count the number of times I've hit it in error, either by poking at "Pause" or "Play" in my darkened living room or by sitting on the controller. It's gone from being an occasionally frustrating surprise, to being an infuriatingly common blunder, all the way around to being some sort of perverse comic relief. "What happened? Why did the movie just stop? Did you hit the STOP button by accident again? You did? THE REMOTE GOT US AGAIN. WE HATE YOU, REMOTE." There are three ways that Sony could solve this problem. - They could re-label the button "Ruin My Evening", and replace the pushbutton with one of those covered safety switches that are used in military cockpits to arm weapons. A button with consequences this significant needs to be clearly marked with a protective cover that you have to move aside, so that there's no way you'll end up pushing it by accident without understanding what it's going to actually do. - They could just remove the "Stop" button entirely. Nobody would miss it. There's already a "Pause" button if you need to take a break. There's a "Top Menu" button to return you to the top menu. There's a "PS3" button to pop up the media bar (with an option to quit the player), and an "Eject" button that also quits the player while ejecting the disk. There is nothing that the "Stop" button should do that another button isn't already doing. - They could make the "Stop" button just return the user to the top level Blu Ray menu, and not quit out of the entire player. They could also make "Play" the opposite of "Stop", where "Play" returns you to playing what "Stop" stopped you from playing. Apart from the "Stop" button this would be a completely fine remote with a four or five star review. It's well built, it runs for weeks or months without batteries, and because it's Bluetooth (not IR) it doesn't need to be pointed at the player with line-of-sight to work. It's like a well-built Mercedes, with an extra pedal between the gas and brake that makes all four wheels fall off. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT. Update: It's actually pretty easy to remove the stop button yourself. Undo the screw on the underside at the bottom of the remote and carefully pry the upper and lower halves apart. Under the rubber buttons there's a layer of conducting pads, a plastic spacer layer, and the circuit board. You can either use a hobby knife to cut out the conducting pad that triggers the stop, or you can put tape over the circuit board contact to render the stop button mercifully unusable.