Yesterday in ZDNet’s Hardware 2.0 blog, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes revealed that despite owning a Harmony One universal remote, he still hangs onto seven other remote controls to handle functions that he can’t squeeze into the Harmony setup. Of course the Harmony One has an infrared learning feature, but even so, there’s not always an appropriate place to put that extra function or two.

Adrian isn’t alone here. A few weeks back, Eric Taub expressed a similar sentiment in the New York Times‘s Gadgetwise blog. It seems the issue is that most remote controls have a lot of buttons for all the different functions available, but on a “universal” remote, it’s impossible to have all of the buttons you need for every application — there just would be too many. As a result, universal remotes aren’t universal enough.

So, why not use a touchscreen and then configure software buttons for exactly what you need? The problem with touchscreens is that there is no tactile feedback — you have to look down at the screen every time you want to find the button to change the volume or switch channels.

So, hardware button layouts are too rigid, and software buttons can be annoying to use. What can we do? Some manufacturers choose to provide both — a touchscreen and some hard buttons. Even so, not all of these remotes allow customization of the touchscreen layout (which defeats the purpose), and you still are stuck with a fixed array of hard buttons, even if some of those buttons do not make sense all the time.

When we designed the RedEye system, we really felt that a touchscreen with customizable layouts was essential. But we also understood the concerns about having to look back and forth between the touchscreen and the TV all the time. To solve this problem, we decided to use the iPhone’s multi-touch gestures in place of hard buttons. With multi-touch gestures, you don’t need to look at the iPhone’s screen to invoke a function — for example, a two finger “swipe” upward anywhere on the screen will work — so you get the same benefit of a hard button. At the same time, gestures are a software thing, so they are fully customizable.

So, is the hard vs soft debate over? How do you like your remote buttons?