Logitech Harmony 360 LCD Remote Control

I remember using a Harmony remote control at a friend's house about a year ago, and felt very underwhelmed by the experience. It was one of the top models with the color screen and all. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I have not had a good experience with any Logitech products. They always look good, seem well built, show a lot of promise, yet when it comes to using them they have always disappointed me. The Harmony H360 was no exception.

I never planned on getting it, but when I saw it at Sears for $34 I simply couldn't resist. Again, it looks super cute and high-end, and I recently bought a XBOX 360 so I decided to give it a try. I've been very happy with my Universal R5 remote, except that for some weird reason it will not control the 360.

I couldn't wait to get home and play with my new toy, so I got right to it as soon as I got back. There is a lot to say about the remote and its set up, and I am not sure where to start.

The remote has batteries installed in the box, as well as a spare set - it uses 4 AA batteries at a time. There is a label on the spare batteries that says: press the XYAB buttons after install - so I did, not sure if it did anything.

After taking everything out of the box, it looked like the first thing to do was pop the install CD in. Let me just quickly say I was not to happy with this solution and here is why.

First of all the software takes 24MB of disc space and is nothing that couldn't not be achieved in a web browser. After about 5 minutes of installing, the first thing that the software did was to demand an update, and a system restart. The update wasn't a point-and-click matter, instead I had to highlight a web addres, copy and paste it into my web browser, download another file, then re-install the software. Why couldn't I just go to a web site and do the remote programming directly through a web browser is beyond me.

Well, no, I do have a good idea. Logitech insists on pushing their crap to the max. Apparently to program a remote control you have to register with them. After the 10 minutes of installing and updating a mini web browser, the next step was to register and create a log in name and password. Registration requires a name, email address, country, zip code, and a password.

** The software would also love to install a piece of crapware called "harmony messanger", which will conveniently clog up your memory, stay constantly open in the background, and periodically present you with annoying pop-ups offering you even more wonderful Logitech products. Sorry, but to me this is not a reputable practice. Now, I highly suggest during installation to go the "custom install" route, and opt not to install the "harmony messanger".**

I hope I covered the software installation. Now let's get to the good part. The software is generic for all Harmony remotes, so after starting it up, the next step is connecting the USB cable between the remote and the PC, after which the two communicate and the software determines which model it is going to work with.

Next step is adding devices. This is done through little drop-down menus. I had a problem with the first drop down - after selecting a category (TV for instance), a new sub-menu popped up to select the type of TV (direct view, projector, etc), the sub menu was very sensitive and would disappear if I hovered the mouse over it, it was very difficult to make my selections.

After somehow managing to "fool" the touchy menus, I was very happy to find all of my components listed - 1 LCD, 1 front projector, 1 audio receiver, 1 DVD recorder, and the XBOX 360. I though "this will be a piece of cake".

Next step is setting up the "activities". I guess this what everyone's raving about, and it does sound great and all...This is when my last hope for anything being "a piece of cake" officially died.

The software suggests types of "activities" based on the already entered components, but there is no way to add custom activities. I found it odd that in a line up that included a TV set, there was no activity "watch TV".

At this moment I realized that despite the seemingly huge list of known brands and models, the software only offered generic layouts and options. The default options for my TV, DVD recorder, and Projector did not correspond with the actual devices, so I had to manually enter and rename various parameters.

An option I though would be simple to have, was my next big annoyance. When setting up my "watch DVD" activity, the sofware asked me what input my projector uses to change it. Since my projector senses the active input automatically, I preferred to skip this step, and save on some pointing time later, but alas skipping this step was not possible.

After about 45 minutes or so I was done setting up and it was time to try if things were good. Well what do you know! Nothing worked. The only component that responded was the XBOX, and except for my Insignia TV all my components are from well known brands.

I hooked up the USB again, clicked "no" on the question asking me "is everything working", and back we were at the set up. I have to do some more manual labor next - pull out the original remotes, point and press, wait, repeat...Another 20 minutes and it was time to test. "play XBOX" this time the TV turned on, and the XBOX turned on, but was about it. It did not change to the correct input, it did not turn my receiver, it did not set it to the correct input either. I thought I'd try using the remote with the device control instead of the activities just to try it. The remote worked, but the mapping to the buttons was all over the place. I had to do trial and error to figure out every task.

At this point I was just about done. I decided to give up on trying to find a functioning Logitech product, and thought I'd just use it to teach my Universal R5 the XBOX 360 commands instead. That didn't work either, because the Harmony takes its time sending the commands, while the R5 doesn't want to wait forever. So the whole excersise was a complete disaster.

I read about 10 reviews saying how if you give it time, and spend the next week or month tweaking and adjusting you'll love it...Does anyone else see what's wrong with that sentence? And even if you do have the patience to set it up, once you do you still sit there and point for like a minute while the Harmony takes its time sending commands. I guess its name comes from the harmony one achieves after practicing the art of Zen discipline while waiting for the Logitech.

Kidding aside, a few more things that I did not care for:

I found the button layout disfunctional, especially the PLAY, STOP, REW, FF, etc group. The number buttons were pretty small, the whole remote is quite long and might require two-hand operation. What bothered me the most was that by default a lot of basic functions were not mapped to hard buttons, but burried instead in the soft selection on the LCD, which for some components was up to 15 pages. That's a lot of scrolling and searching to do simple tasks. I am sure there's a way to customize the layout and all, but again - why is it so ridiculously time consuming to customize this thing? I have programmed a lot of universal remotes, and many times had to teach entire devices button-by-button for each command, still not one has taken this much effort, with so little success.

After yet another disappointing Logitech experience, I think I am going to add the brand to my "avoid" list along with Samsung, Panasonic, and others.