I love my new Logitech Harmony One remote! At last a universal remote that actually accomplishes what it sets out to do and banishes superfluous remotes to the drawer.

To tell the truth I’ve been looking at getting one of these for some time but wasn’t quite prepared to sell a kidney to raise the RRP of £159 for the privilege. A recent cut price offer of £69.99 including VAT and delivery from Amazon and the fact I’ve been meaning to set up a Linksys DMA-2100 media centre extender in my living room and run the cabling for my surround speakers sealed the deal and incentivised the living room re-jig (Thanks to Automated Home for the heads up on the offer).

After mixing up my T568A and T568B plug terminations a couple of times I had the hardware installed and the cabling set up and was ready to try out the remote.

As with all recent Logitech products good ergonomics and styling have obviously been a high priority during design and production. The only small downside being the repositioning in the palm that is needed in order to use the touch screen buttons, I  can live with this though as the selection of “hard” keys is well thought out and extensive with all the common transport keys present. The underside of the unit has two large grooves to fit your hand position when seperately using the hard keys or the touch screen.

Line of sight has not been an issue as yet with all of my sequences and the pre-assigned macros working every time regardless of the direction I point the remote. There is an IR transmitter at each end of the remote which obviously helps with this. My AV hardware is inside a cabinet so I intend to grab an IR repeater to allow me to use the remote with the cabinet doors closed.

Despite some gripes I had heard from other users I found the setup process to be relatively straightforward, logical and hassle-free though perhaps there have been software updates whilst I have been considering selling organs that have fixed these issues.

The setup software starts off by asking for the model numbers of the devices you intend to control and then suggest activities such as “Watch TV”, “Listen to Music” etc. with the relevant IR codes already retrieved from the Logitech database. In the extremely unlikely event your device is not listed then you also have the option to manually learn commands from the original remote.

There are a small number of very good quality predefined icons for the most popular activities but I would have preferred to have been able to cusomise these with my own icons especially seeing as when I come to integrate my Idratek heating and lighting controls I will be forced into using the single generic “Utility” activity icon.

As a number of my activities occur from within Media Centre I found having to switch between these activities a little cumbersome so instead I am using a single Media Centre activity for these actions with seperate “Watch a DVD”, “Listen to a CD” and “Listen to Radio” activities where I use other devices. I did find I had to swap the actions of the “Menu” and “Exit” hard keys as the menu button was bringing up the Linksys DMA-2100 hardware setup menu rather than the intended Media Center “Green Button” UI, I also assigned the “Exit” button to emulate the media centre “back” button.

Next to set up were the favourite channel icons. The software only comes bundled with a select few US channel icons so not wanting to create custom icons myself and suspecting somebody else would have already done the hard work for me I carried out a bit of googling and came across Icon Harmony which allows you to select from hundreds of International channel icons and neatly packages them up into a handy zip file. As I am only using Freeview tuners in my media centre server all of my regular channels along with their timeshift counterparts fit snuggly into the 24 favourite limit. If I later add a DVB-S tuner for satellite reception then I may have to be more selective with my favourites.

One more subtle but convenient addition to the remote is the presence of a tilt switch which recognise when you have picked up the device and turns on the backlighting and LCD display so you don’t need to double tap the screen, another great thought from Logitech and that extra little detail that is often overlooked by other manufacturers.

Conclusion – Without doubt an exceptional addition to any AV setup and the first universal remote I have used that actually allows you to realistically hide away the original remotes for good. Also, now that the product has been on the market for a while it seems to have approached a more acceptable price point. If Logitech allow custom activity icons via a firmware update (which I am sure is possible) then this already outstanding remote would be near perfect.

Disclaimer – Readers of this blog should not form any assumptions regarding my musical preferences based on the title of this entry :p.