Logitech Harmony 650 Remote Control Review

Setup

The setup process is one of the things that makes this remote unique. Instead of looking up and inserting codes for your equipment, everything is done for you automatically. You simply hook the remote up to a PC or Mac computer with the included cable and install the software. As shown in Figure 9, the Micro USB connection port is on the top of the device.

Figure 9: The top of the Harmony 560 remote

The software installation begins automatically and the process has easy-to-follow instructions. You are asked to fill out a simple questionnaire. All you need to know is the make and model of the equipment that you want to control and how they are connected. Once you insert this information, activities are defined and the software looks up each of the devices and inserts the proper codes.

We set up a Samsung TV, a Pioneer receiver, a Time Warner digital cable box, a Samsung Blu-ray player, and a Sony CD player. The software automatically set up each of these devices in the remote control. We expected to have trouble with the Sony player because it is about 10 years old, but it didn’t pose any problem for the Harmony software. They have over 5,000 devices in their database and if you like you can check online to make sure your devices are supported before you buy the remote.

The software helps you define which devices are used for various activities. These activities correspond to the Watch TV, Watch a Movie, and Listen to Music selections on the remote. Although you are limited to five devices, you can also program in addition activities that may use those same devices. Since we already reached our limit on devices, we could not insert our Wii or Xbox as a device, but we were still able to set up activities so that pressing a button on the Harmony remote turned the television on and set it to the proper input for playing these devices.

The software does an excellent job of automatically mapping obvious functions to the default keys. If the functions of the device don’t have a corresponding key on the Harmony, the choices appear on the screen when you choose that device.

After the quick setup, our remote worked seamlessly to turn on and control our equipment for the various activities. So we turned our attention to putting our favorite TV stations into the Harmony. This was also easily accomplished, except for adding the logos. Unfortunately, we had to go to a separate website to grab the logos for the stations. This made the process quite cumbersome. The results, however, were excellent. As shown in Figure 10, our favorite stations were listed on the screen along with their colorful logos, making it easy to jump to our favorites.

Figure 10: The logos of favorite channels

While the main functionality of all of our remotes was now available on our Harmony 650, we found that there were still a few functions that had not been programmed into the Harmony. For instance, when we wanted to go to the list of recorded shows on the Time Warner DVR, we had to go back to the Time Warner remote. The solution was to add that functionality to the Harmony Remote. This required having the remotes talk to each other and letting the Harmony learn the additional functions. Unfortunately, this was not as easy as the main setup. After a trip to the Harmony website and a thorough look at the User’s Guide, we were able to transfer all the necessary functionality to the Harmony. Again unfortunately, these addition functions appeared on the screen. So to access a function like “List” (for a list of recorded shows), we had to press the Device button, then choose our cable box, then use the arrow keys to scroll over to the required function, as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11: One of the function screens

There would, no doubt, be times that using this somewhat convoluted method of reaching the proper function could be easier than finding the other remote, but we were not too happy with it. So we decided to look further into the User Manual to determine how to program the red, green, yellow, and blue keys shown in Figure 6. Again the process was not as simple as it should be. It took two tries to get it right, but we did get the List function working from one of the color-coded keys and we were able to program the other three keys for other often-used functionality.