I think that I like them, but they do have their problems.
There are the little two button clickers designed for selfies. Unfortunately it's not easy to make the two buttons do something useful like forward/back. Even with multi-button clickers I'm sure you'll have some buttons that are useless. The big problem with the little clickers is that they usually? have a one minute timeout before they sleep. If you read a page a minute (and don't space out thinking about something) you might not notice. If the clicker sleeps you will need to click twice, once to wakeup, once to turn the page.
One of my big beefs is that many clickers present themselves as a qwerty keyboard. You'll see an "A" in the status bar to show that you have a real qwerty keyboard connected and don't need an on-screen keyboard. Ok, there are work-arounds for this, but it's still annoying. Android uses the capability to send a "Q" as the definition of a qwerty. Some clickers get sloppy and say, "I can send every character!" when they can't.
I bought a Chinese $1 clicker and found that it had an EEPROM in it which configures it. So I ordered a dozen and got the same exteriors but no EEPROM inside.
Another annoying thing is that the Bluetooth names are something stupid.
I just bought a new 5 way clicker. Out of the box it worked fine, but it said it was a qwerty. So I did what anybody would do:
- Open the case, determined that it used a 24C128A 16384 x 8 EEPROM.
- Traced the I²C data connections from the mezzanine board to the main board
- Connected a 3.3V µC (like an Arduino, kind of) to the I²C data
- Wrote some code to dump the EEPROM
- Searched for where in memory the HID report descriptor was and decoded that
- Wrote some code to overwrite UsageMinimum in the descriptor to 0x28 (Enter is the first sendable key, no letters available).
- Wrote some code to change "remote helper" to "5 Way Clicker"
The key mapping is ok for now. The sixth button sends goofy multiple codes but it will take more decyphering of the binary dump to figure out how to change that. The bad part is that none of the addresses or details that I've worked out have any bearing on any other clicker (unless it's identical).