Unfortunately, the older Mobilepro's range was limited to a few inches. There is no way to tweak the native software to increase that range either. I imagine it might be possible to use one of those addon extenders to compensate, like one of the CF card IR devices, or maybe even the speaker type found here:
http://www.griffintechnology.com/griffinmobile/totalremote/skins.html#
Luckily when the 900 series came out, NEC revised their hardware and I'm good for about 15 feet or so...
But maybe not either....Rich