Logitech Harmony 890 LCD Remote Control

I received the Logitech Harmony 890 a few days ago & after the initial setup, it was about 95% there. I have only spent a little time on it since working on the couple of tweaks I need to get it exactly right, but am confident I can get it to 100% effectiveness without much effort. Having read numerous reviews before purchasing, I have to speculate that the recent software and firmware upgrades must have fixed many of the problems that others have faced with this remote

In many ways the software for this is very slick and clever; but in other ways it is not particularly intuitive, which does cause some problems with "ease of use". For example, after finishing some adjustments, it was confusing to find there was no "finished" or "done" button to save what I'd done; but rather, I had to figure out that I had to hit the "back" button several times to get to a screen where there was a "done" button to save changes. My biggest issue was immediately after installing the software & doing the web updates, when I connected the remote as instructed for the first time it was not being recognized. After fiddling for a while with the FAQ and troubleshooting, it eventually recommended rebooting, and that magically solved the problem.

My setup consists of a Sharp projector used as a TV and for DVDs, a Philips DVD player, a DishTV combination set-top box and PVR, and a set of Logitech 5450 surround sound speakers/receiver. For a remote that seems to have thought of everything & is somewhat targeted to PVR users, I was surprised there was no discreet button for the "PVR" button on my Dish remote to bring up the list of programs recorded to the harddrive; but that was easily fixed by assigning an unused button in the "activities" adjustments.

Two of my components sit behind the seating area in my family room, and the RF/IR extender works flawlessly with those non-line-of-sight components. In fact, my satellite receiver has better response time now than with the original remote (I have always found the small lag with the DishTV remote a bit annoying, but otherwise loved the remote for it's great layout).

Build quality seems excellent, and I love the backlight and the screen which immediately asks me when I made changes if they worked correctly, and tries alternatives when you answer no (thereby correcting the problem). As I mentioned, I have one or two tweaks that I need to figure out to get it perfect, but am very pleased with the results. The on-screen guide, skip-forward/back PVR buttons, and other non-standard remote functions all worked flawlessly from the first attempt.

I think they have largely worked out the bugs with this product and I highly recommend it.