Kodak announced their new Kodak Theater HD Player on Friday. In many ways this new product seems to line up as a “me too” in the digital media player ecosystem — support for 720p HDMI output, photo sharing, music sharing, etc. It does have a nice lineup of partners for content (including Kodak’s own photo sharing, Flickr, YouTube and RadioTime), but not enough to make it stand out from the Apple TVs, Roku NetFlix boxes and Vudus of the world.

What is new and different however, is the remote control. Kodak isn’t too forthcoming with the details, saying only:

Just point and play—the unique pointer remote makes it simple to navigate menus
Breakthrough user interface designed specifically for an HDTV

But the inference is clear — the system uses a motion sensing “pointer” remote to interact with the system’s onscreen interface. No more clumsy up/down/left/right D-pad maneuvers to get to your content – a clear winner in our book.