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.
So now I know why the desktop software is so bad: It's pretty much the same as the online software on the Logitech website. They seem to render the same minimal UI. Naturally, the only navigation model these guys were able to write is the wizard. All actions are triggered by selecting an item from a huge list of radio buttons and then clicking on at the bottom of the screen. Sometimes you also have or or . Which translates easily into web pages, it just doesn't make much sense for a desktop app.
Another insight is the way they update the profiles on the remote control. When you make changes with the website application in your account, a file with a extension is created and you can click a link to download it. When you download the default application on the Mac that opens it is /Applications/remotecore - which feeds it into the USB and onto your remote control. I'd guess that the same procedure is used by the desktop application, it just calls out to remotecore.
I've been using Harmony remotes for years and although they are easy to program (despite the bad UI) they get out of sync and overall are not that intuitive.
My biggest complaint is that the off button only does one thing, where it should be a button. Just about every piece of HT gear in the US has one power button that toggles the state of the device. Users expect there to be a power toggle button on a remote and the Harmony doesn't have one. I hate explaining to guests that there is one button for off and an another for on. Sure there are more than one ON buttons for a reason, but more often then not my guests just want to watch TV and not one of the other activites.
But this isn't the biggest problem. The biggest is when one device fails to turn on, then you're stuck in hell, etc. I suppose it is the nature of IR and the lack of discrete IR codes for devices, but this is what makes a HA controller work better. Using two way via RS-232 the controller knows the state of the device and never gets out of sync. Of course this is far more expensive and more complex to setup than a Harmony remote, but much easier to use and if you were afraid of the setup, you wouldn't be on this site.