Hi.
I've had homechoice for nearly a year now, and it was only last night that I found myself looking at the remote control properly - the battery had died, you see, but that's by the by.

Thing is, I was looking at the number 1 button, fruitlessly pressing it to tune into BBC One, when I noticed the logo printed on it. Same as on mobile phone handsets and commonly referred to as the "voicemail" symbol.

Surely this can't have been placed there by mistake?

Also, the # key appears to have a "shift" logo on it. Could HomeChoice have long term plans for a voicemail or phone service of some kind? The shift logo suggests text input from the remote, maybe in the same way as text messages are tapped into mobiles, but sent between boxes?

Thoughts / suggestions / criticism welcome... can't believe I never noticed this before.

Or perhaps they were lazy and used some kind of labelling system/buttons/template usually meant for mobile phones?

I thought that, but why, when the remote is *so* unique? They obviously had to have the buttons with the homechoice diamond / TV Guide / film / kids etc etc custom made, so the others must have been done at the same time too.

Seems obvious to me that the HomeChoice network is capable of a *lot* more than we currently use.

It's capable of a fully fledged return path - for example, there's nothing stopping living room video conferencing through it, given the right equipment, obviously. And that's one of the things BT hopes to include in their VOD product later this year.

Just interested to see if anyone else had noticed it there, and if so what they made of it, that's all.

You can get an idea from the Shorditch trial. There you will be able to use PC applications and acesss the web via the STB. The applications run in the exchange and are distributed via a MPEG stream - assuming they are using the Headend software.
Having said that , Microsoft are part of it and they have their own STB's and supply wireless keyboards as part of the trial

They may be there for when homechoice goes to ADSL2/ADSL2+, they will probably allow you to send messages to each other and other boxes in your house.

At the momenet with ADSL you can only have 1 channel continuously which is why it takes a while after switch channels before the channel changes, if you were able to send a text through homechoice now you would have to go off the channel, with ADSL2/ADSL2+ you would be able to text while watching a program as you would be able to send and receive data without interupting the other data being sent.

There is alot that Homechoice would be able to do but arn't as unlike other services homechoice is connected to the internet so data can be sent and recived easier than other services. Homechoice used to have competitions, I won 2 of them (Spanish learning CDs and Charlie's angles)