Perfect remote for our needs

Author's Rating:

Pros: Quick set-up, perfect accuracy of set-up and remote, ease of use, coolness factor

Cons: retail price

The Bottom Line: 
I would definitely recommend purchasing this product without any hesitation if you are looking for something to enhance and simplify your home theatre.

Author's Review
We were looking for an all in one remote, but had had it with the cheap ones that seem to create more frustration than simplification. We were interested in the Harmony Series from Logitech, however with everything other than the 1000, you're still looking at a lot of buttons which scares my wife. So we settled on the Harmony 1000. The retail price was daunting, but realistically a small price to pay for the perfect control it affords us now - also, we purchased it on eBay at a significantly reduced price.

Setting it up required installation of some software off the included CD - it's fully compatible with Mac and Windows. That took about 2 minutes, with no involvement from me. Secondly, it asks you to set up an account which requires a bit of personal information and a list of your components (make, model number). Then the true set-up starts where it asks you what activities you'd like to do with your components. With ours, a relatively simple home theatre system (no lighting, etc), it figured out which activities were in fact options for us, and presented them to us. We chose what we wanted out of them, which was simply "Watch TV" and "Watch DVDs" and from there it asks a couple of questions regarding how you use your TV, DVD player, receiver, etc. For example, it asked, when you want to watch TV, which input does the TV have to be on for the cable box to work, etc. They are all very simple questions, and once you're through them, it loads all this information to remote via an included USB cable. The entire process took me less than 15 minutes. I took it upstairs and everything worked perfectly. I can control my TV, my cable box, my receiver and my DVD player with absolute ease. Best of all, my wife who is a complete technophobe, was using it within a couple of minutes and is in love with it.

The touch screen is bright, and the touch screen based menus that relate to the activities (TV or DVD in our case) are very simple and easy to understand. There are also physical buttons for channel, volume and power control, as well as the directional pad. The unit turns on the instant you touch it or pick it up and turns itself off after about 15 seconds of sitting idle.

Build quality seems very good, I couldn't find any faults with it. The unit comes with a rechargeable battery, and an angled dock which the remote floats on when it is recharging.

This is likely one of the smartest purchases we have ever made and has made life infinitely easier and simpler. I would highly recommend this product. I have only had it a short time, and will update my review as I play with and customize the remote further.