Most PS3 owners enjoy not only the gaming abilities of their system, but also the built in Blu-Ray DVD player. The Sony remote control accessory lets you play those movies with excellent ease.

The remote combines the normal buttons of our other DVD players with the funky look of the PS3. You might have a red, green, blue and yellow button – labelled with their color names! You also get a circle, X, square and triangle to do some things like brinigng up the selections and back choices.

The principal buttons – play, stop, forward, back – are laid out reasonably nicely at the bottom of the remote with substantial buttons. You will find tiny buttons up on top for the number keys, along with a rather tiny eject button.

Missing entirely is actually a power button!! You have to hit the PS button in the center and go by means of the regular PS3 menus to get the power to turn off. In fact, even though I was writing this review, I accidentally hit a button on the remote as well as the PS3 turned on. We were watching standard TV, so now I have to wait until our show is over, switch over to the PS3 and use the buttons to turn the system back off once again. That doesn’t make considerably sense at all to me.

Also, on our Oppo DVD remote, the buttons glow which makes it Truly nice to use in the dark or dim light that many people watch movies in. This unit is totally black with black buttons. This makes it pretty significantly useless in low light conditions until you memorize all of the button locations. You would think by now that remote control makers would have their buttons backlit or at least glow-in-the-dark to handle this.

The unit takes two AA batteries which makes it a bit heavy, but certainly within the normal range of remotes.

It’s effortless enough to sync up the remote with the PS3. It’s bluetooth powered, so you go into the PS3 menu and use the choices there to indicate you’ve got a brand new remote. Note that the base level PS3 won’t manage this – you have to have a connection to the internet from your PS3 and run an update routine. When you don’t have an online connection for your PS3, you have to develop an update CD on your PC to do this update.