Everyone loves gadgets but not everyone can afford or willing to spend on them since they are not a necessity. I personally love gadgets too and I only buy what I think is necessary. The latest gadget that I bought recently is the Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote. The name of the gadget itself tells you that it is a universal remote that is meant to combine all your multiple remotes into one. I have 6 remotes sitting on my living room and they are for Television, AV Receiver, Satellite (Astro), WD TV (media player), ceiling fan and air conditioner. When you have that much of remotes lying around, there are times when you will need to look around just to find that particular remote because it is probably hiding it one of the corner at sofa. Moreover for older people who are not so technologically advanced, it can be very confusing for them to even watch a TV with so many remotes involved.
Now with this Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote, I can control all of the electrical appliances at my living area with only one remote and keep the others away. I go to know about this universal remote through my wife’s cousin-in-law and immediately went searching for one at our local Malaysian auction website (Lelong). When I got the remote, the remote looks pretty slick with a shiny surface and a full color touch screen. What I like most about this remote is you can turn on multiple devices with a single button, sort of like macro commands. For example, when I want to watch Astro, our local Malaysian satellite TV, I would have to turn on the TV, AV Receiver, and Satellite. The Harmony remote can do all that for you with a single click.
As good as it sounds, the setting up can be quite a pain. It took me a couple of days to get nearly everything right (even now it’s still not perfect but I can live with it). Even though setting up the Harmony remote is from the guided online setup, but it is not that easy.
First of all you need to add the devices to the Harmony remote by keying in the exact model of the devices. Then you can setup Activities, which is the same as macro commands to automatically turn on multiple devices. This part can be quite tricky as some devices takes longer time to power on, such as the Astro Byond (Pace) decoder. You will need to play around with the delay settings to get it right. The troublesome part is when the Harmony remote doesn’t work, you will have to connect the Harmony remote to your computer, tweak the settings, re-upload the configurations to the remote and then try again.
Logitech Harmony remote can control up to 15 devices and has support for 5000+ brands and 225,000+ devices. If the model is not in the list, you can use the infrared learning capability to copy the code to the Harmony remote. Amazon is selling the Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote at $165.55 but I bought it at $243 in Malaysia. Oh well, the price of imported stuff in Malaysia is always more expensive.