Fooled around with DOF in photoshop for the first time.
Not bad… 
I’m really excited about texturing the holes, as any modeling would definitely ruin the topology!
Yeah, it saves a lot of time eh.
What do you mean by texturing the holes? Sorry if I’m missing something obvious!
Instead of modelling the holes for the buttons which can sometimes ruin the edge flows and general shape of the surface of an object, just use opacity maps. It works well with items like this where you cannot see beyond the buttons.
Ah of course! I would have modelled it and ended up with a weird and wonderful topology as I did when I modelled my mobile a few years back. Will give this a go at some point, thanks.
Well, cell phones are mostly flat in the button area, or have some single curved shape, you wouldnt ruin that kind of a shape too much by cutting holes into it. Plus, buttons are symmetrically and uniformly placed, here they had a pretty uneven arrangement, and the whole top part is curved, with additional details. Here for example, i had to hide some tricky parts under buttons.
True about the buttons on a mobile, I was new to it at that point though so probably made it far harder work that it needed to be The remote looks great though and your materials are spot on.
Thanks!
On a cell phone you can also make one module basically, like you do a button you can also model a hole around it and just array it. Here i think the worst detail would be below the CH and VL +/-, there are two buttons there sitting on the end of a half moon like rib. Nightmare!
How long did it take you to model it? The more I look at it the more detail I see. I’d like to see some more views too…
around 3 hours, i ran into some trouble which took me a while to figure out how to solve it, mostly regarding these channels betwen the parts
The cheat worked well here for sure - I would never have known 
Looks good overall too.
b
I was surprised myself 