Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I purchased this item on black Friday sale last month at amazon. It was my first Logitech Harmony universal remote. Let me say that I have not even a single complaint with this item. If you would look at my living room before I got this device, I looked like a wholesale street peddler for remotes. It was quite embarrassing when guests would arrive and see that I have 8-9 remotes all stacked up around me. I had tried my luck with the non-intelligent universal remotes in the past (the Radio Shack brand ones) and it was a hassle to get my remote setup with the devices I wanted. It was a further continuous battle with the remote to control each device and switch the remote between the different modes. It is much easier to have 5 remotes around you than it is to fumble with a single remote to try to perform basic tasks. I had also tried the feature you get on DVD and TV remotes where you can configure it for additional devices. I had the same frustrations there. I had it in mind that I indeed was needing some sort of a solution here, it just never occurred to me that this device would make my life so much better. When I saw this item featured on amazon black Friday sale last month, I pounced on it; thinking that if it doesn't work out, I can always send it back. Here are my detailed comments regarding this product. Initial setup: ========= Unwrapping the box was very easy. It was packaged in an easy to open clear hard plastic shell and I just needed to tear the plastic along the dotted lines. Setup required me to go to the myharmony website and install a plugin. I use a mac at home and I did have some trepidation from reading the reviews about this product. People have had bad experiences with the software setup. Mine was exactly the opposite. It asks you for all your devices at first. You type in the name of each device and model number and it matches what you provided against its database and confirms with you whether the one it found as a match is the correct one. It needed further confirmation on one of my devices, my Sony DVD/VCR seemed to have a couple of different variants. It simply asked me to take my VCR remote and point it to the IR input port on the bottom of the device, apparently this is where it can learn a different remote's signals. It recognized the signal just fine and setup everything else accordingly. For each device it also asks you to specify which input port is the device connected to onto the TV. For example my DVD player is hooked up to the TV on port HDMI1, the cable set top box on HDMI2, the old VCR on Composite1. It needs this information to switch the input on your TV when you select an activity. After feeding in all the devices, you define all the activities you will be performing withis remote. That's the beautiful part about it. Everything is configured according to the functional usage, the 'activities', and each activity is composed of several mini tasks and provides a context for your remote to operate. I would give the activity a name, and it would ask which device will be used for the video output, which for the audio output, and which to change the channels or play/pause/rewind/ffwd. Everything was fairly intuitive. After all the devices were configured and all of the activities were defined I had to do a sync between the computer and the remote via the USB cable. That happened without a hitch. Normal Usage: ========== This was the real eye-opening experience. The real charm and usability of it is the fact that it is so user-friendly and designed for normal practical usage. The activity-based layout of the interface was a real novel idea for me. The remote starts out by offering to walk you through what it calls the helper. I found that I quickly got over the learning curve and quickly dispensed with the helper and went solo. I select which activity I want and it does the rest. It turns on each device sequentially, and then it sends a signal to the TV to switch to the correct input mode. It takes 2-3 seconds for it to do everything and during this time you see a logo on the remote's screen that it is transmitting the signals. I usually keep it pointed to my TV/devices for the duration of this time. All buttons are laid out intuitively as they should. Volume control and mute buttons send the signal to my audio receiver, play/pause buttons send signal to the DVD/VCR, and, depending on the activity, if I'm watching cable, the same play/pause buttons control my DVR instead. No more switching the modes on my remote everytime I need to change the channel and control the volume interchangeably. It's truly a smart device and makes my life so much easier because it is intelligent enough to change its behavior based on the context we're in. If at all something doesn't happen correctly, I can quickly switch over to the "devices" mode (as opposed to the "activities" mode) and select the device I want and send device specific commands to set things right. For example if during the initial signals it sends, it missed sending a signal to the audio receiver or if I pointed somewhere else by mistake, I can quickly go to "devices" mode, select the audio receiver device, send a signal to turn it on and then switch back to the "activities" mode and let the party begin. One other neat feature here is the "All off" button. If I want to shut everything off, I just hit this button, it knows the devices that are currently in use, and sends a signal to those devices, 2-3 second process and everything turns itself off lickety split. Customization/advanced features: ========================= I recently used the software to re-program some of the buttons. That again was very easy to do. I first start by telling it which activity I wanted to customize, I then select the device and looked for the function I needed to assign. In the center there is a diagram of the remote and I can hover my mouse over each button to see what function is assigned to that button. I then took the icon of the function I needed to assign and dragged it and dropped it on top the desired button on the diagram and voila! A quick sync afterwards and I was ready to go. The whole thing literally took all of 5 minutes for me. I actually did this re-programming exercise twice. The second time around there was a nifty little button to set everything to default settings to clear out my customizations. Then I did the drag & drop thing once again to the new desired settings and synced it down to the remote and I was good again. Other features: =========== I didn't know until I started using this device that the thing has a motion sensor. The remote is able to detect when it has been moved. Normally it sits quietly at the side of my couch until I pick it up. Only then does it turn itself on and the screen lights up and allows me to page through and select which activity I want to engage. While I was researching the item I noticed that this remote has a rechargeable battery and it charges itself through the USB sync cable. It certainly cuts down on the cost of me buying new batteries when I run out. I did worry though if these were non-standard batteries. If so, and if the thing runs out of charge while I'm using it, then I'm stuck until I get it charged again. Luckily this is not a big issue, since I can swap out the batteries with standard AA types and it will run just fine. I opened the battery compartment the other day and saw that the rechargeable ones that were in there were the same size/shape as the AA kind. I'm reading on product reviews that someone was able to use AA on these, I haven't tried it myself. Amazon product specs say that it has non-standard batteries and I'm not sure if that's entirely misleading. The battery life itself is not bad at all. I use the thing for a couple of hours every day on weekdays and maybe more on weekends. I've been able to get by for more than a week without charging. I think I'll just set a day and will put it on charge overnight, let's say Sunday night, and that would last me the entire following week. Another thing I'm seeing everywhere on product detail pages is that it can control 6 devices. I have mine configured to control 8 devices: TV, Bose speakers, 3 DVD players, Cable, Apple TV, and Jadoo set top boxes. It talks to all devices without any problem. I was concerned while doing my research that 6 might not be enough. During the initial software setup when I was specifying all the devices, I kept on going until I finished entering my last device and that's when I saw the "add more devices" button greyed out. Slight drawbacks (maybe it bothers others, I'm okay with them): ============= Sometimes during normal use, I have to press the same button many times, e.g. pressing the down button to go through the channel guide on my cable box. I find that as I am pressing the button repeatedly it is a hair of a bit slow in responding. I know I could go faster with the native remote than this one, but it's not slow enough to be an annoyance. Although the look and feel of it doesn't feel cheap at all. If I physically look at the remote while using it, I can see that pressing on one button causes the neighboring buttons to also move. This indicates that all buttons are not independent of each other and are all molded from a single piece of rubber, I suppose. This isn't a big deal as the buttons don't feel cheap at all while pressing them, and who really looks down at the remote while operating it anyways? I don't. You shouldn't either.. Anyways, that's my review of this item, I hope you got some useful information from it. If you have any further questions please feel free to ask as a followup to this review. Thanks.