Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Product But...
Comment: I've had the Harmony One over a month and it is a very capapble device. Set up and use can be very complicated if your av system is not completely standard like mine turned out to be. The customer service was very patient and ultimately "solved" my problem (2+ hours) which was caused by the extra long delay in changing inputs required by my Magnavox tv.
I would recommend trying the unit and if you can't get it to easily work smoothly send it back.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Harmony One is Number One!
Comment: This is the best remote in the Harmony line, as far as I'm concerned. My old 880 was a pain to charge because of a faulty designed charging cradle. They have addressed that concern with this model and there isn't a problem with charging anymore. I also like the way it fits in your hand and the touch screen is great.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Inconsistant performance & Annoying Wizard that won't go away
Comment: My sister bought this for my parents and I got involved because they couldn't get it to work and needed help. When I got there the remote would simply run in a continuous setup cycle and wouldn't actually do anything useful. I tried taking the battery out and waiting 15 min to no avail-apparently there were bugs in the included programming app and I was advised to use the web app for programming.
That got the remote going-well sort of. The remote was purchased to simply switch between live cable and a tivo series 2 box. The problem is the performance is inconsistent- sometimes it works, sometimes it will select the computer input rather than the tivo or cable input. Other times nothing happens at all. You can get around this by going into the TV menu and looking around for the source input and manually selecting it -not a biggie for me but too much for older parents especially since there are so many options it is hard to find.
For me, the worst part of the remote is this very annoying wizard and I think it actually causes some of glitches we have encountered.
From time to time it appears and asks if you want help and from that point on the remote stops working until you tell it yes or no- not even the volume control will work when this unwanted pest appears. I suspect some former employee from Microsoft came up with this idea since it sort of reminds me of clippy and the fact that it is so intrusive. It does ask if you you want to hide the wizard but apparently you can't disable the darn thing without reprogramming it again. By this time my parents had enough so they simply put it away and bought a $19.95 universal remote. Not perfect but it works and no unwanted pests either.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Long Time Spent To Not Solve a Nonexistent Problem
Comment: I'm giving the Harmony One one star because it failed to improve my home theater and I spent a whole frusterating day figuring that out. Other people with different setups might very well love the Harmony One. The remote costs as much as Blu-Ray player, so everyone should have super high expectations. Good universal remotes can be had for 1/5 the price.
My main setup is a DirecTV HD DVR, an Onkyo receiver, a Samsung HDTV and a Toshiba DVD recorder, all of which less are than a year old. I also have a PlayStation, an old VCR, a camcorder and a TV/DVD in the other room that the remote was supposed to control. I never got that far.
An online wizard programs the remote, which sounds good. In my case the wizard immediately asked nonsensical questions. For example, it asked me to choose an input mode for the DVD recorder from a list the recorder doesn't support, in an activity where the signal doesn't even pass through the recorder. The wizard doesn't have any knowledge of how the system is connected or what the components can do necessarily, it only knows the codings for the remotes.
This wouldn't be a problem if it were possible to bypass the wizard and simply set the remote up to do what it should do. Instead it's required to get through the first part - wrong answers and all - and try to correct the problems in the main page.
I was encouraged by the main page in the software. I spent hours setting up activities and mapping buttons (the defaults were nowhere close to right). The software design requires a lot of navigation back and forth, and clearly isn't intended for advanced users. To me the point of buying an expensive remote was to do everything the other remotes could do in a better, more efficient and more consistent way. This turned out to be a very time consuming process in the Logitech software.
After downloading the data to the remote the real problems surfaced. Activities didn't turn the components on. No problem, there's a Help button. The Help button asks a lengthy series of questions, tries different combinations, and after a few minutes of pressing remote buttons the components turned on to watch TV.
Clicked the button to turn everything off. Nothing happened. Repeat the long, tedious Help process - only this time it asks questions for all the components that weren't involved in the first place. Frusterating.
If this were a 1-shot process, where Help just corrected the settings for use next time, it wouldn't be a big deal. That isn't the case with my components. Despite my best efforts something regularly went wrong, requiring the Help button to step through the procedure.
The activities always try to set inputs on components, even if the inputs never change. That can cause flashing that wouldn't appear otherwise. In the case of my Onkyo receiver the Harmony remote repeatedly sends the input command which causes the relay to click over and over. In my setup the change is unnecessary in the first place, and tripping the relay repeatedly each time I turn on the TV is needless wear and tear.
At this point I'd spent over 6 hours programming and debugging the remote. I'm an engineer and programmer by profession.
I wrote up a detailed email to Logitech support from inside the program. When I clicked "Send" the page said "You were logged out" or something like that, and offered no way to go Back to copy my message. My long, detailed email to Logitech was gone.
At that point I realized that even if I could get the remote to operate my setup efficiently - and that would involve probably hours on the phone with Logitech - the benefit just isn't there. The Harmony One is fancier than the DirecTV remote, with better materials and button feel, but it's a little bigger, heavier, the DVR functions are too low and the touch screen can't be used reliably with one hand.
As part of my day trying to set up the Harmony One I discovered that I could fix all of the startup irritations in the setup by changing the input assignments on the Onkyo and by adjusting some of the cryptic HDMI-CEC settings on the components. I should've taken a closer look at what my components provide before solving a problem that didn't exist.
"Activities" is a nice idea, but it's really just an abstraction of the buttons on the existing remotes. For a complete home theater it takes a lot of work to set them up, and in my experience the result is fragile. I've since returned the Harmony One and am content with my original set of remotes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: No ordinary remote
Comment: $200 for a remote control?!? This is no ordinary remote control. It will change your life and the way you interact with your entertainment center forever.
You see, most remotes (even universal remotes) only control one device at a time. Want to watch a DVD? You have to turn on the TV, turn on the DVD player, turn on the home theater system, then press Play. How many steps did it take? No wonder peaple want to throw their remotes (and the devices they control) out the window.
The Logitech Harmony remotes take a different approach. Want to watch a DVD? Simply press the "Watch DVD" button and the remote takes care of the rest: it turns on the TV and sets it to the correct input; turns on the DVD player; turns on the home theater system and sets it to the correct input, too. All you have to do is press Play once you've popped the DVD into the tray. When you're done, press the Off button and the remote turns everything off.
The Logitech Harmony remotes are "task-oriented" rather than "device-oriented." The software for Windows or Mac is easy to use. Just set up your tasks, tell it what devices you have (you'll need the model numbers), and how they are hooked up to each other. The software uses its vast database to program the remote with all the commands necessary to perform each task. You may need to tweak a setting here and there, but once it's set up you'll never need all those device-specific remotes on your coffee table again. Put them away and leave this one out.
For control freaks, the software lets you program the function of literally every button on the remote. You can even change how fast the infrared commands are sent to the devices.
$200 may seem like a lot of money for a remote. But when you add up all the time it saves in the long run, plus the smiles on your significant other's face as he or she is finally able to use the entertainment system without your intervention, and it's worth every penny.
Summary: Excellent Product But...
Comment: I've had the Harmony One over a month and it is a very capapble device. Set up and use can be very complicated if your av system is not completely standard like mine turned out to be. The customer service was very patient and ultimately "solved" my problem (2+ hours) which was caused by the extra long delay in changing inputs required by my Magnavox tv.
I would recommend trying the unit and if you can't get it to easily work smoothly send it back.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Harmony One is Number One!
Comment: This is the best remote in the Harmony line, as far as I'm concerned. My old 880 was a pain to charge because of a faulty designed charging cradle. They have addressed that concern with this model and there isn't a problem with charging anymore. I also like the way it fits in your hand and the touch screen is great.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Inconsistant performance & Annoying Wizard that won't go away
Comment: My sister bought this for my parents and I got involved because they couldn't get it to work and needed help. When I got there the remote would simply run in a continuous setup cycle and wouldn't actually do anything useful. I tried taking the battery out and waiting 15 min to no avail-apparently there were bugs in the included programming app and I was advised to use the web app for programming.
That got the remote going-well sort of. The remote was purchased to simply switch between live cable and a tivo series 2 box. The problem is the performance is inconsistent- sometimes it works, sometimes it will select the computer input rather than the tivo or cable input. Other times nothing happens at all. You can get around this by going into the TV menu and looking around for the source input and manually selecting it -not a biggie for me but too much for older parents especially since there are so many options it is hard to find.
For me, the worst part of the remote is this very annoying wizard and I think it actually causes some of glitches we have encountered.
From time to time it appears and asks if you want help and from that point on the remote stops working until you tell it yes or no- not even the volume control will work when this unwanted pest appears. I suspect some former employee from Microsoft came up with this idea since it sort of reminds me of clippy and the fact that it is so intrusive. It does ask if you you want to hide the wizard but apparently you can't disable the darn thing without reprogramming it again. By this time my parents had enough so they simply put it away and bought a $19.95 universal remote. Not perfect but it works and no unwanted pests either.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Long Time Spent To Not Solve a Nonexistent Problem
Comment: I'm giving the Harmony One one star because it failed to improve my home theater and I spent a whole frusterating day figuring that out. Other people with different setups might very well love the Harmony One. The remote costs as much as Blu-Ray player, so everyone should have super high expectations. Good universal remotes can be had for 1/5 the price.
My main setup is a DirecTV HD DVR, an Onkyo receiver, a Samsung HDTV and a Toshiba DVD recorder, all of which less are than a year old. I also have a PlayStation, an old VCR, a camcorder and a TV/DVD in the other room that the remote was supposed to control. I never got that far.
An online wizard programs the remote, which sounds good. In my case the wizard immediately asked nonsensical questions. For example, it asked me to choose an input mode for the DVD recorder from a list the recorder doesn't support, in an activity where the signal doesn't even pass through the recorder. The wizard doesn't have any knowledge of how the system is connected or what the components can do necessarily, it only knows the codings for the remotes.
This wouldn't be a problem if it were possible to bypass the wizard and simply set the remote up to do what it should do. Instead it's required to get through the first part - wrong answers and all - and try to correct the problems in the main page.
I was encouraged by the main page in the software. I spent hours setting up activities and mapping buttons (the defaults were nowhere close to right). The software design requires a lot of navigation back and forth, and clearly isn't intended for advanced users. To me the point of buying an expensive remote was to do everything the other remotes could do in a better, more efficient and more consistent way. This turned out to be a very time consuming process in the Logitech software.
After downloading the data to the remote the real problems surfaced. Activities didn't turn the components on. No problem, there's a Help button. The Help button asks a lengthy series of questions, tries different combinations, and after a few minutes of pressing remote buttons the components turned on to watch TV.
Clicked the button to turn everything off. Nothing happened. Repeat the long, tedious Help process - only this time it asks questions for all the components that weren't involved in the first place. Frusterating.
If this were a 1-shot process, where Help just corrected the settings for use next time, it wouldn't be a big deal. That isn't the case with my components. Despite my best efforts something regularly went wrong, requiring the Help button to step through the procedure.
The activities always try to set inputs on components, even if the inputs never change. That can cause flashing that wouldn't appear otherwise. In the case of my Onkyo receiver the Harmony remote repeatedly sends the input command which causes the relay to click over and over. In my setup the change is unnecessary in the first place, and tripping the relay repeatedly each time I turn on the TV is needless wear and tear.
At this point I'd spent over 6 hours programming and debugging the remote. I'm an engineer and programmer by profession.
I wrote up a detailed email to Logitech support from inside the program. When I clicked "Send" the page said "You were logged out" or something like that, and offered no way to go Back to copy my message. My long, detailed email to Logitech was gone.
At that point I realized that even if I could get the remote to operate my setup efficiently - and that would involve probably hours on the phone with Logitech - the benefit just isn't there. The Harmony One is fancier than the DirecTV remote, with better materials and button feel, but it's a little bigger, heavier, the DVR functions are too low and the touch screen can't be used reliably with one hand.
As part of my day trying to set up the Harmony One I discovered that I could fix all of the startup irritations in the setup by changing the input assignments on the Onkyo and by adjusting some of the cryptic HDMI-CEC settings on the components. I should've taken a closer look at what my components provide before solving a problem that didn't exist.
"Activities" is a nice idea, but it's really just an abstraction of the buttons on the existing remotes. For a complete home theater it takes a lot of work to set them up, and in my experience the result is fragile. I've since returned the Harmony One and am content with my original set of remotes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: No ordinary remote
Comment: $200 for a remote control?!? This is no ordinary remote control. It will change your life and the way you interact with your entertainment center forever.
You see, most remotes (even universal remotes) only control one device at a time. Want to watch a DVD? You have to turn on the TV, turn on the DVD player, turn on the home theater system, then press Play. How many steps did it take? No wonder peaple want to throw their remotes (and the devices they control) out the window.
The Logitech Harmony remotes take a different approach. Want to watch a DVD? Simply press the "Watch DVD" button and the remote takes care of the rest: it turns on the TV and sets it to the correct input; turns on the DVD player; turns on the home theater system and sets it to the correct input, too. All you have to do is press Play once you've popped the DVD into the tray. When you're done, press the Off button and the remote turns everything off.
The Logitech Harmony remotes are "task-oriented" rather than "device-oriented." The software for Windows or Mac is easy to use. Just set up your tasks, tell it what devices you have (you'll need the model numbers), and how they are hooked up to each other. The software uses its vast database to program the remote with all the commands necessary to perform each task. You may need to tweak a setting here and there, but once it's set up you'll never need all those device-specific remotes on your coffee table again. Put them away and leave this one out.
For control freaks, the software lets you program the function of literally every button on the remote. You can even change how fast the infrared commands are sent to the devices.
$200 may seem like a lot of money for a remote. But when you add up all the time it saves in the long run, plus the smiles on your significant other's face as he or she is finally able to use the entertainment system without your intervention, and it's worth every penny.
Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote Reviews: Page 3 of 67
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