An impressive remote, but a real hit to the wallet

Note: the Harmony One does not come with an HDMI cable. One of the sellers must be providing a cable and somehow that has made it into the item title.

I joined a website called Bzzagent.com several months ago. The site occasionally gives out items for users to try, and I was lucky enough to be sent out a Logitech Harmony One remote to play with (and keep!). It's a $250 remote (although it is currently available with a 15% rebate), which is a bit steep, but if you're like me and have a bunch of different devices, you'll enjoy having a solid universal remote. I already had a Harmony 680 remote, so a lot of this review will compare those two remotes. I will divide this review into three areas: style, set-up, and usage.

Style-

This is one slick looking-remote. The 680 is gray and had a lot of buttons, so it looks like something you could run a power plant with by remote. The Harmony One, which from this point will be referred to as the One, has fewer buttons and relies on a touch screen on the upper portion of the remote to make up for the fewer buttons. The buttons are also larger than on the 680, helpful for those with larger fingers.

The One is black with a flash of gray at the bottom. The black is actually in two flavors because of the material of the remote. The top is shiny, while the bottom is flat. This is visually appealing, but you'll find in a few seconds that the shiny black plastic and the touchscreen LOVE oil, so fingerprints accumulate quickly. It's like a forensics dream piece of evidence! They do include a cleaning cloth for the remote, but I don't really want to have to clean a remote after every use. I will admit though, once I realized that the remote picked up gunk like that, I was a little more precise when using the touchscreen and buttons so that I wasn't grabbing and poking around as much. So far it has only needed to be cleaned on occasion instead of every 10 minutes.

The weight of the remote is nice. My 680 is definitely heavier, but that's because the 680 uses 4 AAA batteries. The One uses a rechargeable battery, so that drops the weight a fair amount. Fortunately, it isn't too light; you still feel like you're holding a solid remote that can withstand a short fall (and how many times in your life have you dropped a remote, maybe 100?).

The touchscreen is nice and bright and large enough to see everything easily. The default settings do a good job of spacing things out so that you can easily hit the important spots. You can modify a fair amount of things on the remote, including how the touchscreen looks. I haven't played with this function, but I am sure that certain settings look much better than others. For me, the default settings are fine.

The buttons are a nice size and feel good when pressed. I've had some cheap remotes that, when you press a button, the button "jiggles", feeling like it could come off at any moment. The 680 buttons always felt good, and the One buttons are on par with that, if not slightly better. One thing I do like is that the wheel button around the OK button on the 680 was replaced with four arrow buttons surrounding the OK button. That's actually easier I think to use than the circle.

Overall verdict- some very nice visual features, but the fingerprint effect is strong. It is easily on par with what people have experienced with the iPod touchscreen. Relatively speaking, it is a minor distraction, but when you're spending this much for a remote, it is something to pay attention to. Other than that, the remote definitely would look good as part of any home entertainment system. Grade: B


Setup-

I was very lucky here; I already had a Harmony remote, so setup was less than 20 minutes for me (that's from unpacking the box to sitting on the couch and using the remote with all the settings correct). I'll run through two versions of the setup process, my experience and what most users will experience. All of these harmony remotes use your computer to set everything up, pulling remote control codes form their huge database of codes and loading those codes into the harmony remote. So you'll need a computer with a USB port and a good internet connection with these remotes.

If you own a harmony remote already (my situation), you have two options; you can move your current account from your old harmony remote to the new one or you can create a new account for the new remote. I chose to move my account over, since I didn't plan on having two remotes for the same set of systems and didn't want to go through the whole setup process again for the new remote (I just wanted to start using this puppy!). Moving the account over was simple; I plugged in the One and the logitech software asked me if I wanted to make a new account for this remote or transfer my current account to this remote. I told it to the transfer the account, watched it find the remote, and came back five minutes later after it had loaded all of the settings into the remote. I unplugged it, took it to my system, and tried it out. All the settings were fine, but I didn't like the order of some of the buttons on the touchscreen, so I went back and made some changes. After another five minutes to upload my changes to the remote, it was totally ready to go. As you can see, it was a very fast process for programming a universal remote.

If you are a new harmony user, you'll need to do a few things that will make the setup take longer. First, you'll need to download the newest version of logitech's remote software. The One does come with the newest version (version 7.4 I believe), but considering how quickly updates to software can come out, your safer bet is to just go to the logitech website and download the current software. Once you've done that, go through the installation and just follow the steps to create an account and add in all of your equipment that you want the remote to control. I should mention that whenever you make changes to the remote through the software (which I believe is the only way to do it), you'll have to log on to the logitech website to do it, so be prepared for that. It's not a bad idea to write down the product codes for everything and take them over to the computer (logitech even includes a spot in the manual for writing all that down), then you don't have to do as much running back and forth between the computer and your stuff.

Once you've got everything in the software, you may have to do some tweaking, so have the remotes handy for those devices if possible. I ran into a couple of devices that the software didn't have codes for and needed to get those from the original remote. Once you've got everything in the system, hook up the remote and it will start transferring those settings and information (if you have to add codes from an old remote, this is the stage where the computer will prompt you to do so since it uses the harmony remote to get those codes in). After you've got everything in the remote, play with it a bit with your devices and identify the things that aren't set up properly (I can guarantee that there will be at least a handful of things that you'll want to modify). Take the remote back to the computer, make the changes, and load the remote back up and you should be ready to go. As you can tell, this is a much longer process, so give yourself at least 1-2 hours to get the remote up and running exactly like you want it.

The only other thing to set up is the charging base (I mentioned the battery is rechargeable, and I love that ability). The charging base is shiny black and has an AC adapter that plugs into the bottom. The cord is the standard 6 feet in length, so you can't move the base too far from an outlet. The remote just sits in the base, it doesn't lock in place, so don't plan on wall mounting it unless you plan to tape your remote to the base when you are done with it. The charging base is helpful in that you will probably always know where your remote is. Also, the remote seems to sit well, not falling into positions where it may not be charging because it isn't perfectly aligned in the base.

The last thing I should mention, which I probably should have mentioned first, is that the remote comes without the battery installed, so you do have to slide the battery into place. The battery looks like a cell-phone battery or some digital camera batteries (the thin, rectangular battery), and slides easily into a slot covered by the gray portion of the bottom of the remote. That gray cap is easy to remove; push the black button in and slide the cap off. So you do want to make sure you install the battery and maybe even let it charge overnight before you start the rest of the installation. My battery actually came with a 50% charge, so I started using the remote that day instead of waiting for the next day. I might have lost a charging cycle by doing that, but that's like one lost out of 1000 charging cycles so I'm not concerned.

Overall verdict- easy to set up for previous harmony remote owners. New owners should expect to spend 1-2 hours on setup though. The setup is not that painful assuming you have name-brand equipment. If you have to start manually adding equipment and remote codes, expect your setup time to increase noticeably. Charging base is nice, but too bad it can't hold the remote in place so that you can wall mount it. Now I actually have to have a shelf around for my completely wall-mounted system or charge the remote in a different room. Grade: B


Usage-

This is the area where the remote really shines. It has a lot of very useful features and then a handful of odd features. Luckily, those odd features don't detract too much from the remote.

Let's start with the positives:

The remote is designed for running lots of devices at once, and to do that it uses what are called "activities". You can control each device individually or use an activity to operate a set of components together. For example, I have an activity called "watch tv". When I hit that button on the touchscreen, it turns on the LCD display, cable box, and stereo system, and tunes the display to the HDMI input (I have an HD cable box/ DVR). When I hit the channel button, it changes the channel on the cable box (not the LCD display), and when I hit the volume button, it changes the volume on the display, not the stereo (the stereo is more of a subwoofer and rear channels, so those are pre-set or set individually). I think this function is really the best function of the remote. You don't have to be a genius to get everything running, just be able to identify what it is you want to do (watch TV, listen to music, watch a DVD, etc.). The activity buttons can all be programmed and adjusted through the software, so that's another huge plus.

There is also a help function that will troubleshoot when devices aren't behaving properly. The usual culprit in our house is someone turning something on or off without using the remote, so the remote gets "confused" about what state the component is in. The help system uses very understandable questions to get the problem resolved. It asks questions like, "Is the TV on?" or "Is the cable box on?" Once you answer the question, it will respond based on your answer (if you say, no to whether the TV is on, it will try to turn it on and ask you f the TV is now on). Of course, if you don't know a cable box from a TIVO box, that can be a problem.

The touchscreen is great. The touchscreen is basically lots of softkeys; buttons that change based on what portion of the menu you are viewing. When I am watching TV, those buttons let me quickly access my stored DVR recordings, the OnDemand channel, or my favorite channels. When I al watching a DVD, they become pause, skip, and zoom buttons, and when I listen to a CD, they switch to pause, forward, and reverse. The default is 6 buttons viewable on the screen, with multiple pages so that you can have dozens of softkeys available. The touchscreen is bright and can be seen in low light conditions easily.

The organization of the remote is into "regions", so each region is tailored for a specific type of experience. For example, most of the lower buttons are things you would use with a TV or cable box (the number pad), while above that are the buttons you would use with a VCR or DVD player (play, pause, fast forward, etc.), and above that are buttons for a cable box (menu, guide, exit, etc.). Now some of those buttons go across regions (like if you want a specific scene on a DVD you may use the numbers to get to it or you may pause your DVR recording using the DVD/VCR buttons). I find this layout a bit better than for the 680. With the 680, you might find yourself hitting buttons all over the place to use the equipment. Of course, a lot of that probably isn't due to the organization of the buttons but to the reduced number of buttons on the One compared to the 680. The only button that I think isn't handled so well is the OFF button. It is a tiny button in the top-left corner. It would be nice if it was slightly bigger, but I can understand not wanting it to be too big so that you prevent accidental button presses.

The last feature I want to mention is the power-saving function. The touchscreen has a 5-second timeout, so the screen goes off after no activity for 5 seconds, saving battery life. What is interesting though is that the remote has a tilt sensor, so when you lift it, the screen immediately kicks on. I thought that was pretty neat. In fact, I spent several minutes just waiting for the screen to go black and then tapping the remote to see how much movement was required to get it to turn on (turns out it isn't very much, maybe a few degrees of tilt).

Now here are a few of the odd functions-

You can add a slideshow to the remote that plays while it is in the charger. I guess someone may find this useful, but I don't. My remote isn't in a spot where someone can sit and watch the picture change, and most likely, if you're looking at the remote it is because you want to change the channel (and you would lift it up and turn off the slideshow in the process). You also have to have images of a very particular size for the slideshow to be worth making, otherwise images get stretched and butchered to the point that they are worthless. I believe it accepts something like 196X240 pixel images (.gif files).

Speaking of pictures, it looks like you can also add graphics and logos to your favorite channels if you put them in the softkeys. For some people that could be very useful (maybe the eyes aren't so great and you can make out the ESPN logo for example better than just the letters ESPN). For me, that just becomes me wasting time on something that we don't need (I barely use the favorite channel listings as is).

Lastly, if you go into the software, there are more settings than you can shake a stick at! If you can stick with the basic settings for your devices, you should be fine, but you can really get in there and dig around if you want. You can adjust things like how long to wait to send a command after a button is pushed, the duration of the pulse of IR that sends the command, and the order devices are turned on. So if you have one device that is a little slow to turn on, you could have it turned on first even though it may not need to be on until later in the process. At any rate, some of those extra settings can really put a snag in the system, so just be aware of their presence but try to avoid them until you are sure you need them.

Overall verdict- it is a fully functional universal remote, doing things much better than other universal remotes I have owned (including the 680). Many of the functions it has though are functions that their previous remotes already had, so unless your harmony remote is really old or doesn't have the buttons for something (I'm not sure if that is even possible though to be honest), so it probably isn't worth upgrading from your older harmony to this one. If you're a first-time harmony person or looking for a universal remote and have a substantial budget, this should be a strong consideration.

Final verdict-

The Harmony One has a lot of built-in functionality and gets plenty of cool points. One thing I did not mention but is worth knowing is that this remote is IR only, so no RF capabilities. That means you'll always have to have line-of-sight from the remote to the device. I'm not sure why they didn't include RF in a $250 remote, but I guess you have to cut corners somewhere once you start putting touchscreens in devices. The software-based programming and the great help menu are among it's strongest qualities, but these things are shared among most of the harmony remotes (even the less than $100 remotes), so those aren't exclusive to the One. The touchscreen though is a wonderful upgrade to the liquid quartz displays of some of their older/ cheaper remotes, it's just a shame that it gets so dirty. Overall, it is a great remote that has some places for improvement.

Final grade: B+

If you would like additional information about the remote, you can check out Logitech's website: http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/remotes/universal_remotes/devices/3898&cl=us,en