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Antec Fusion Remote Black

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For the full review, please checkout Antec Fusion Review at HardwareLogic

 

As we take a look at the front of the main box that the Fusion Remote black comes in, we can see that Antec has given us a glimpse of what we can expect when we open up the box to see the goods. We see that it comes with a nice remote control for our home theater system. It also gives us a nice picture of the case itself, as well. Looking to the left of the case, we can see some icons that show music, game pad, and video camera. This would indicate to us that Antec’s case can serve many different applications.

At the back, we see that Antec has given us a description of some of the features that we can expect when building in the Fusion Remote Black enclosure:

 

 

From left to right, we see the user manual (printed in several languages), the remote control and batteries, two bags of screws, three black snap together (we were not sure what these were. More on that later), a power supply extension (we're not sure, upon first taking a look, why Antec included this), a black plastic cover that appears to be a fan block off, and the software disk with the iMedian program. The larger bag of screws also containing special screws for attaching the hard drives to the bracket that contains the silicone grommets.

 

 

When we first took a look at the remote here in the lab, we were a bit surprised at how many functions one could actually use with a remote for a home theater computer. Many of the remotes from other manufactures have very basic buttons and commands; but with the Antec Fusion Remote, there are numerous commands and functions. One that may take some getting used to is the large black round control in the upper center. By default, this is used much like a touch pad on a laptop. It will scroll your cursor on screen thus allowing one to use the lower left button just below the pad to left click as though one was using a mouse button. The very bottom button below the main control is the enter button. Next to it is the right click like the right mouse button. At the very top of this section on the remote control is a switcher between the mouse, and keyboard commands. As you probably have noticed, there is a full number pad further down the remote. If one switches to the keyboard functions this area becomes a basic keyboard. We found that we could type, very slowly, but none the less it can be done. One can also switch to the number pad as well. Then this becomes a full number pad for different tasks.

At the very top of the remote control, there is a green button on the left, and a red button on the right. The red (right) button is the power button, which will turn your new home theater computer on or off. If you have your system on and hit this button, Windows will go through the standard shut down stage, saving any thing that you were working on at the time.

The green button is used for application exit. If you are working in Microsoft Office, for example, and hit this button, it will save your work and exit the application.

Below this set of buttons are the audio/video commands. This is the area were you can control your standard play, pause, stop, forward, and reverse commands much like a standard stereo or DVD player.

As we move down to the center area of the remote, there are a few more function buttons to be had. These include an application launcher, task switcher, mute, timer, volume switch, and a channel switch. Right in the middle of the remote is a button labeled "go." This button is the iMEDIAN HD launcher. This starts the included software for your total entertainment control.

As we move to the very bottom of the remote control, there are four colored buttons; red, green, blue, and yellow. These are control buttons for videos, music, pictures, and TV respectively. The four buttons below these are bookmark, thumbnail, zoom, and full screen. Below these, there are yet another four buttons with the first one being colored purple that is marked DVD. Next to that button is menu, subtitle, and audio.

At HardwareLogic lab, we were a little surprised at how complete the remote control was for a case at this price point. We actually fiddled with this control for a couple of hours, and still did not get to use all of the functions this little remote has to offer. This is a very nice extra touch on Antec's part.

 


First taking a look at the very front of the Fusion Remote Black, we can see on the far left top the main monochrome LCD display. This gives information such as time, movie title, artist title, song title, and can even be programmed for local temperature. Below that is the external optical drive bay. Antec even built this to "stealth" your optical drive with a black brushed aluminum cover. Further to the right, we see a Firewire port and dual USB ports. A little further to the right we can see the two front audio ports. Next to them are the reset button and the main power button. The large dial right above the reset button is the system volume dial. We really did not see the specific need for this, as the main volume control was part of the full featured remote control that we just discussed. However, we did find that this dial added a bit of class to the overall design and look of the Fusion enclosure.