A great idea, but maybe only for the tech-savvy or extremely patient

After using a Sony learning remote for years, my system recently got much more sophisticated and I needed to upgrade to something with a little more brains. Enter the Harmony remote.

All of the different remotes in the Harmony line run in the exact same way, they just differ as to how many buttons they have, and how the screen is setup.

Basically, out of the box, the remote does absolutely nothing. There is no booklet filled with numerical codes, or a fifty page setup guide filled with sequences of obscure button presses necessary to program the remote.

Instead, you install some software on your PC, and configure the remote there. The basic programming process consists of you punching in the model number of each of your devices, and then defining each of your "activities", such as "Watch a DVD", or "Listen to the Radio". To set up, "Watch a DVD", you tell the website what input your TV and Receiver need to be on, how you want to control the volume, etc.

When you want to watch a DVD, you simply hit the "Activities" button, and select the "Watch A DVD" option from the LCD screen. The remote will then send the appropriate commands to set everything up. When it is done, the buttons on the remote are setup to control your DVD watching. For instance, the Volume buttons will send volume commands to your receiver, the Play/Stop/etc. buttons will go to your DVD player, etc.

The remote keeps track of the "state" of all of your devices, and will power on and off devices as necessary. For instance, if you were watching a DVD and want to watch TV instead. It will power off your DVD player, but since your TV is already on, it will just switch the input over to "TV" from the "DVD" input. But if you were listening to the radio before, it knows to power the TV on first.

It will also control pretty much anything with an IR remote, like an A/C, Ceiling Fans, whatever...

This is all great, in theory.

The problem is that their database of devices isn't perfect, and much of the promise of this design is lost. For me, personally, the "default" options would not switch between TV inputs properly. The program thought that if you kept hitting "down" in the input menu, it would scroll back up to top. Instead, what the TV does is just sit there if you keep hitting "down" and those extra keypresses are "lost".

I was able to fix it, but it took some trial-and-error, and some non-intuitive option changes to fix the problem. (About an hour of work overall.) What I did was go through the "troubleshooting" for the device, and have it send the "Input" button over and over, instead of the down arrow. This does cycle back to the top. I also had to shorten the default "input delay" from 2 seconds to 300 msec. (This delay was put there to begin with because many TV's ignore button presses during input changes. This does not apply here, as the TV does not actually switch inputs until you are done selecting it, or if you wait too long.)

I didn't call their tech support to see if they could have fixed the problem, but my point is that I should not have had to do any of this. I do tech support for a living, so this sort of process was not too bad for me, but folks that just want stuff to work out of the box may be disappointed.

I will admit that other than that one glitch, the remote works exactly as promised, and it was much easier to program than my old learning remote, and it is a lot more capable. The idea of tracking the current state of your components is very powerful, and means far fewer button presses to switch between tasks, and it gives you far more flexibility than any other remote costing less than a couple of hundred.

I did have some problems with the software: a "cannot display content" error, but a two-minute google search revealed a fix: go directly in your browser to http://members.harmonyremote.com/ and that worked fine.