Logitech Harmony® 880 Advanced Universal Remote
Ok. I usually don’t advertise for products (at least not for free) BUT I cannot not mention that I bought the best thing ever for Christmas. It’s called the Logitech® Harmony® 880 Advanced Universal Remote. Not only it performs as advertised but the user experience was amazing! This remote allows me to control my Tivo/Xbox/DVD/TV/Receiver/Cable box with 1 single remote control! The amazing thing is that it is capable of not only sending IR commands in a row for a given ‘activity’ but it also knows how to recover if a device was not in the ‘right’ initial state. At any time, if it doesn’t work, you can press the ‘Help’ button and it asks you what is wrong and tries to fix it in sequence. For example, it asks you if the TV is on. You answer No, it turns it on. It asks you if it’s on the correct input. No .. fixed. It’s SO cool. And setting it up took only 10 minutes. You go on their website, you say what hardware you have and how it is connected (what TV input and what Receiver channel) and voila. The most impressive stuff was that it was not working properly at first. Every time I would switch activity (Tivo to DVD), it would switch also the TV inputs (although it shouldn’t) as if it thought the TV was not on the right input already. I went back to the site, found some ‘advanced’ settings and was able to found out that my remote thought the TV had more inputs than it really had. I was able to configure it exactly with the right number of inputs and the problem got fixed in 5 minutes! Now that’s a perfect user experience! Now I can turn on and off my entire system with 1 single remote and 1 single button! No more pressing TV off button + Receiver Off button… One word Logitech (Harmony): Bravo!