Packetbytes

Logitech Harmony One Universal Remote

How many times have you picked your remote up to find that you have the wrong one in your hand, well the answer is an All-In-One Remote but boy some of them look ugly and do not offer the full controls needed for your many devices. Well that is until now as Logitech has the cool and slick looking Harmony One Universal Remote which can control many devices from DVD’s, TV’s, Blu-Ray Players as well as PC’s and games consoles, such as an Xbox 360 and a Sony PS3.

Tweaktown decide to test the Logitech Harmony One Universal Remote just to put the device through its paces, just to see how well it performs, here is their final thought on the product “We tested the defaulted macro settings next, and we found that they worked extremely well. They did exactly as expected; turning on the TV, changing channels, selecting different AV modes and working the Xbox 360. We even found we were able to control the Air Conditioning unit as well, so that if you wanted a single button to press in the morning to turn the TV on to CNN and the Air Conditioner to cool the room, you could (if we had some remote control blinds I’m sure it would have done them too).

After playing around with all the defaults and making sure the remote worked as it should with each piece of equipment, we started to mess around and create our own macros and start to use Windows MCE and the Xbox 360 interface.

Custom macros were no problem at all; it was fairly easy to set up the macros to do almost anything we could think of. The only problem we encountered was with our Air Conditioner unit which we are sure was due to the fact that the remote attempts to send all the signals, one after the other, and the air-con unit did not seem to recognise when it was receiving its command stringed with a bunch of others. You can offset this by adding delay to the commands to allow for a pause of up to a few seconds before the remote sends the command to the device. This still seemed not to work however, and we could not tell if it was our doing or a fault of the software in the remote control.

Working through Windows MCE on the other hand was an easy task as a lot of the hard buttons on the remote are setup for navigation, making it a complete doddle. Similarly for the Xbox 360 navigation; easy as pie! (Though I cannot see anyone playing any games with it any time soon.)

My last serious gripe about the remote is that there is a slight delay between pressing a button and the command registering on the piece of home theater equipment. Case in point: the volume control. Sometimes I wondered for a second if I had pressed the button, but then if I pressed it again the volume shot up louder than I was expecting. I’m not sure why it takes so long for a command to be sent/recognized, but it would be nice if Logitech could find a way to speed this up in their software (hint hint).”

Via: Source