Logitech Harmony 525 Advanced Universal Remote Infrared Universal remote control for Audio system, VCR, TV, DVR, DVD player

I've had my Harmony for a few months now. It works fine, exactly as I had hoped and I am now extremely pleased with it....

....BUT, I thought I had better write a review before I completely forgot how nearly I could not get this thing to work, and I am IT and AV literate.

THE PREDECESSORS
I have had three 'learning' remotes in the past, none of them satisfactory. They were either too uncomfortable to hold, too battery intensive or just not good enough at learning. I was aware of the brilliance of products like the Philip's Pronto but its prohibitive expense and my now deep lack of trust in such products meant I could not justify getting one.

This time though, I had ended up with nine remotes in my living room and had had enough. After reading up on a few options, this was the product I settled on, mainly because I know and trust the company who make it, and the price did not break the bank.

APPEARANCE
First impressions were excellent. The remote feels lovely to hold (and I have very large hands). It is beautifuly balanced, and although long, has finger supports on its reverse just where you need them so you never lose grip when stretching for more distant buttons. The finish is a good quality mix of black, chrome and grey plastic. The buttons have a good positive feel, although one or two need quite a firm press to get them to work. The backlighting is reasonable (I have seen better), but does at least stretch to every button on the handset.

ONLINE HOMEPAGE
Before you can use the remote, you have to install and follow the instructions on your PC or Mac. The software will work with Mac's OSX, or Windows 98SE, ME, 2000 and XP. The Harmony has a USB socket at the top and you plug this into your home computer with the supplied cable. For the record, my PC is a Dell Dimension Pentium 4 running WIndows XP Pro.

It turns out that, rather than installing a huge amount of software on your own machine, it creates a personal web page for you on Logitech's own website. You have to be online to get this remote to work and need to remember your user name and password for future editing. It is the online aspect that really slows things down though, even with my 2MB broadband connection. I was really twiddling my thumbs sometimes as I waited for the mouse click I had just made to take effect. It became even more frustrating when I accidentally clicked more than once and found that I had paged several times too far ahead into the setup.

SELECTING YOUR HARDWARE
It it wasn't for this annoyance, these first stages of the setup would have been very straight forward, and very logical. You begin by telling it what your equipment is... eg: TV - Panasonic, DVD - Denon and so on. The website has a vast database of all kinds of equipment, from ancient CD players to my extremely obscure remote control light switch, and this model can control up to 15 different machines. If you cannot find your hardware (very unlikely), you can teach the Harmony from your existing remote and it will then upload the codes to your personal website (and presumably then adds it to their own database).

ACTIVITIES
Once you've taught it about all your hardware, it asks you 'how' you go about various activities. For example, if I want to 'Watch TV', I need to turn on my TV and set it to AV2, turn on my VCR and set it to AV1 and turn on the set-top box. It asks you all these questions in the form of multiple choice and all possible combinations seem to be catered for. It then asks you which machine you use to change channel, which to change volume and so on. I was even able to programme two DVD watching options - one through the TV, the other through the AV system and projector, the latter including a light-dimming function! I noticed I could even have included motorised screens and various gaming consoles.

UPDATING THE HANDSET
Once you have selected all the options, you click to save and your online profile is duly updated. The software then prompts you to update the handset, which starts a several minute upload of all the instructions to the Harmony through the USB. Finally, in theory, you are ready to go.

FIRST TRY
So, my experience so far had been fairly straightforward if frustratingly slow. With great trepidation I approached the Living Room and sat infront of the TV. There is a button at the top of the Harmony labelled 'Activities' and on pressing this, all the activities I had programmed appeared on the LCD, four at a time with scroll buttons at the bottom to reach other pages. Great! They were all there!
It is possible to edit the order in which each activty appears and to chose their names. You can also programme the two 'soft' buttons at the base of the screen to activate certain functions not present elsewhere on the Harmony. I pressed 'Watch TV' and the VCR and set-top box both came on to the correct channels, but the TV stayed stubbornly silent. A signal had obviously been sent to it as the red LED on the set blinked, but it was either not the correct signal or perhaps the correct one but not for right length.

HELP
There is a help button on the Harmony, which I pressed to be taken through a set of questions on the LCD screen. "Did this cure the problem?", "Is the TV on now?", etc. etc. All to no avail.

I tried another tack: there is another button at the top labelled 'Devices' that brings up a list of all your hardware. As soon as the particular machine is selected, all the Harmony buttons control that one machine. I duly selected 'TV' and pressed the power button. Fortunately this did the trick and the TV came on. I found that all the functions from the original Panasonic remote, even obscure tuning, aspect and setup functions, were available, which impressed me. Things were clearly not working as they should though, so I followed the main manual's advice and plugged the Harmony back into the USB.

ONLINE HELP
My PC immediately recognised its new friend and automatically fired up my home page (remember you need to be online). I clicked trouble shoot and followed the clear but still very slow instructions. Each change I made was uploaded to the handset and tried. There were dozens of parameters I could change - methods of turning on the TV by selecting a channel, toggling on and off, even teaching it an exact frequency or learning from the original remote, but none of these worked.

The final recourse was to contact the Logictech team via an e-mail link from the home page, filling in which component I was having trouble with and what nature the fault was. There was a promise to get back to me within 24 hours.

SIX HOURS DOWN THE LINE
I had been setting up for six hours by now, and it was Friday night so I gave up and returned to my nine remotes for the remainder of the evening. It turned out that this was to be for the remainder of the weekend as Logitech didn't reply until the following Monday afternoon. When the reply came it was impressive. I had a polite note from a technical support person (Gerald, if I remember correctly), who was sorry for my troubles and told me that he had added a new parameter to my TV power controls, which allowed the signal to be transmitted for longer. This was already uploaded to my home page (almost spookily), and I duly downloaded the change to the Harmony via the USB.

Eureka! The TV came on, so did the set-top box and VCR! At last! AND I could control my lighting. With a smug grin, I decided to try the Hi-fi and selected 'Listen to CD' from the Activity menu. The VCR and set-top box turned off and the amplifier and CD player came on... but the TV was also still on, and it soon dawned on me that the 'off' control for the TV no longer worked.

FOUR DAYS DOWN THE LINE
I was back onto the support team via e-mail instantly and this time the reply came back in a couple of hours, trying another method to turn the TV off. By Tuesday afternoon there had been two more e-mails to technical support before the TV properly worked, both of these were courteously and swiftly dealt with.

This is the crunch though - my TV is an extremely common Panasonic wide-screen model, only three years old. It is hard to accept that the Harmony had managed very obscure and high end components with ease, yet not this basic model. I wondered why the 'duration' parameter was not available by default with the software. I could adjust almost everything else manually, including how long to wait between each signal is sent and what frequency the signal is sent at, and I could teach the Harmony individual commands direct from the original remotes, but never was I able to adjust duration without contacting technical support.

To be fair, the Harmony learnt every other function perfectly, including a frighteningly complicated Lexicon AV decoder, and ancient InFocus projector, not to mention the afore mentioned remotely dimmed light switch.

CONCLUSION
I came tantalisingly close to having a very positive experience setting up this product and I can see how close they are to getting this right. If it wasn't for the sluggishness of the online homepage and the language barrier between the Harmony and my Panasonic's power controls, my experience would have been perfect. I pity the person with less patience or techno-knowledge than me, and only hope that Logitech have learnt the pitfalls of Panasonic's power protocols through my sore experience.

Now, a few months down the line, I am extremely glad I persevered. Those eight hours over four days it took to set up seem like a drop in the ocean, especially considering three other learning remotes had failed for me over the last several years (including a Cambridge Audio and Marantz). These had all been at least as pricey as this Harmony and are all now donated to various friends and family, whilst I am now very relaxed and confident that I have at last found the ideal all-in-one solution.

The handset still looks and feels great and is as good as new. Not once has it missed a beat since my final visit to the setup page, being used daily and still on its original (4 x AAA) batteries. It even wakes up in the morning, somehow detecting my vibrations as I walk in to open the curtains! It is clear that the Harmony will remain up-to-date for as long as the Logitech database continues updating signal codes, no matter what new equipment I invest in.

I can thoroughly recommend this handset, just get someone else to set it up for you!