The Harmony One is just a better hardware than the Harmony 895, so no difference there. It has less buttons, mostly because the little LCD has a touch sensitive area around the screen (where the 895 had like 10 buttons). The software for all Logitech Harmony RCs seems to be the same too.

The Harmony 1000 is what I tried next. It is quite expensive, about 400 EURs. You get the same software but a real touchscreen. Quick summary: It's not worth it.

After only half a day, I already hate the Logitech software. There is no single thing that I could name, it's all bad. The user interface is amateurish and navigating it is very very awkward. There are also some things you just can't do.

For example, I thought it would be a good idea to create an activity (a macro) called I'm going to bed, turn everything off. That doesn't seem to be possible. Any device that you select to be part of an activity first TURNS ITSELF ON when the activity is selected. Well, you can configure everything so that devices that are NOT used for a particular activity are turned off. So I thought I'm smart and created an activity without ANY devices, hoping that if I would switch to that activity, it would turn everything off. Nope, that's just a broken setup because there are no devices selected and you can't transfer this activity to the remote.

OK, so that makes the whole thing unusable because I need to keep the old remotes around just to turn everything off. Wait! You can always stop using the activities and just access the plain IR commands of any devices directly. You pick a device on the remote from a list, then you get pages and pages (12 for my AV receiver) of alphabetically sorted buttons with IR command names. So to turn everything off, I'd have to go into each list and find the PwrOff or PwrToggle command.

Well, still doable if you are really determined. Except that the PwerToggle for my TV doesn't seem to work. The IR command is probably wrong. So I tried to change that in the setup software on my computer. Surprise, all you get when you click that option option is Call help desk. The last would be to try the IR Learn mode but somehow I don't feel like this is worth it.

My conclusion is that this Logitech universal remote stuff is at best average. The software is horrible and besides the IR command database there is no value there. All I want is a simple button to IR-command-macro mapping, this doesn't exist. The flagship product, the Harmony 1000, costs more than two iPod touch and it still feels like last-century technology.

The Logitech remote controls I wanted to test just arrived. This is a quick review of the first one I unpacked, the Logitech Harmony 895.

First, it looks like this is an older model, or a model in an older series. The other two I ordered, Harmony One and Harmony 1000, look much more modern and definitely had another revision of hardware design. The 895 has too many buttons, even for a configurable device.

The 895 is probably labeled an Advanced RC because it comes with an RF extender - a little box you attach to your USB port and which does apparently two things: Talk to other devices via RF and Z-Wave (I don't have any) and feed IR commands into a whip of up to 8 mini IR senders. So you can basically control at least one room in your house with IR and the rest with RF. I'm not sure how good this RF is through European concrete walls but I doubt that it will manage to reach two floors down to my living room. I don't have many wireless devices that can do this. Also, I'd expect that the USB connection to the computer is only needed during setup and you then can move that RF box anywhere you want.

The remote itself does it's job OK. However, the Logitech software for OS X is bloody awful. I didn't expect much, Logitech keyboard software is also bad. It's buggy - sometimes input fields can't be focused - and it uses a braindead wizard-style UI for everything. But the only good part is the IR device selection, I can pick AV Receiver and Kenwood and type in my model number (no dropdown there). It automatically found all IR commands my receiver understands. Yes, it needs an online connection for that and it seems to synchronize any changes you make to your setup with a website anyway. I've tried that website and it has some simplistic lists and buttons which offer a subset of the desktop softwares functionality.

I like the separation into Activity (which is what I'd technically call a Macro) and custom buttons and commands. On the other hand, that's how anybody would design such a software.

A nice little gimmick is the tilt sensor. If you pick it up from its dock, the remote realizes it's being held upright and turns on the backlight of the tiny LCD.

Well, it does it's job flawlessly although I had to tweak the response/reaction times a little, a Volume Up keypress would otherwise take a second until registered on my AV receiver. Geeks certainly won't have a problem with the hardware and software and it looks like even regular people should be able to set up a macro.

Moving on to the Harmony One.