Harmony - Shortcomings

I am not an installer, just your average person who has an obsession with his home theater. I purchased the Harmony 890 after a cup of coffee killed my pronto TSU 6000. Although I pretended to be upset, I was secretly happy. I was tired of the touch screen. I wanted hard buttons. Since I needed a new remote immediately I decided to buy the Harmony while I searched for the ultimate remote.

Getting the Harmony up and running was fairly straightforward. I did have a few problems with the install program crashing. I did manage to get the latest version of the software running in a fairly short period of time.

The initial setup was very impressive. The software takes you through a wizard that asks you questions about your equipment. (This is well described in other reviews so I won't elaborate). One thing that was a bit confusing for me was that it did not ask the question: “Is your DVR the same unit as your cable box?” I have a high def cable box that is also a DVR. When I ran the setup I ended up with two separate devices. This was not a big problem because I was able to delete one of them later.

The last step of the setup is to load the settings onto the remote and the radio frequency receiver (RF). The 890 works with an RF receiver so that you don't have to point the remote at your equipment. This is important for me as my equipment sits behind me. I was surprised that settings need to be downloaded to both the remote and RF receiver. This was not an issue for the initial setup. In subsequent setups it became really annoying because I had to disconnect and unplug the RF receiver every time I changed something on the remote. There is also a process on the remote that needs to be run each time to initialize communication between the remote and the RF receiver. I was also surprised at how long it took to load the settings onto the remote and RF receiver. It takes about 1 minute for the RF and 2-3 minutes for the remote. This is compared to the Pronto’s loading time of about 30 seconds. Also, on the Pronto you don't need to load settings onto the RF receiver.

After the initial setup, I was impressed. It actually worked as promised. I pressed "Watch TV". The TV, cable DVR and receiver all went on and were set to the correct inputs/outputs. The volume buttons were assigned properly to the receiver for all devices. I switched to DVD, and it performed the appropriate steps as well. I have IR controlled lights in my media room. The remote operated these properly as well. It took me hours to get to this point with the Pronto!

That was the highpoint.

As I started using this remote to watch TV I began to see the Harmony's shortcomings:

Ergonomics:
Although the remote looks pretty cool, there seems to be a bit of form over function. The buttons are not placed ergonomically. They are too close together. They feel cheap. I constantly press two buttons at the same time by mistake.

Response:
The remote seems to respond slowly to commands. I am not sure if this is related to the RF receiver or not. If I wanted to watch channel 701, I would press 7 then 0 then 1. I would not see the 7 registering on my screen until about a second later. Initially I was not worried about the delay. I knew it was configurable. The remote can be configured with delays between button presses as well as delays between devices. I tried several different combinations of setting in attempt to optimize the speed of channel changing with reliable channel changing. This is when the annoyance of having to load settings on the RF device came to a head. Each time I wanted to try a new setting I had to unplug and disconnect the RF receiver, attach it to my computer, download the settings to both the RF receiver and remote, hook it all back up again, reinitialize the communication with the remote and then retry. After several attempts and even a call to customer service, there was still a slight delay and enough of a delay to cause problems when , for example, trying to a stop fast-forward. In the world of the DVR, this is quite aggravating.

Help Button:
The next issue I had relates to when devices do not go on and off. The remote is actually set up to handle these situations. If, for example, you press watch TV and the cable box does not go on. You can press help and it will ask you. "Is the TV on?", "Is the Cable Box On?" Etc.. The remote will continue asking you questions until the remote is in sync with the state of your system. This is a very helpful feature. I actually like how the remote keeps track of what is on and what is off. The part that annoys the heck out of me is how often you need to use this feature. I would say out of very 10 times I turn on or off the system, 2 of those times I will need to use the help button. All the help button really seems to do is to toggle power buttons.

Custom Button Locations:
Another mildly annoying thing has to do with custom buttons. If you are setting up custom buttons from different devices on the same screen, the software will re-sort the buttons by device thereby changing the location that you specified. This does not help the ergonomic situation much.

Remote Freezes:
At least once every few days the remote control will freeze. No buttons will work, the remote will just stop working. The only way to get the remote to work again is to take out the battery. When you do this you also need to re-run the RF setup on the remote to add your RF receiver.

I kept the remote for less than one month. During that time I became more and more unhappy with the Harmony. I ended up purchasing the MX-950 remote and RF receiver from Universal Remote Control. It is very similar to the harmony except that it works better and faster, is ergonomic, it doesn't crash, and it does not have a help button (because it doesn't need it). Although the MX-950 lists at a much higher price than the Harmony, the real world price is quite comparable.

I would recommend the Harmony 890 to someone who wants to get his or her remote working quickly but who does not really care about:
1- How well the remote responds
2- Ergonomic button placement
3- How much the remote can be tweaked.

This is not for the TIVO user or channel surfer at all. It will get your system up and running quickly. It just won't work very well.