For quite some time I've been a huge fan of Harmony Remote Controls. As a passionate customer I think I've personally sold at least 10 of these remotes to friends and most likely even more through this blog. (Check out this mini review of the Harmony 880)
Well the 880 has been retired in our home and I've moved up to the Harmony 890 remote. The 890 is a bit more expensibe than the 880, but it was well worth the update. I loved the 880, but the installation software was really weird. It was sort of a mix between a web browser and a smart client all mixed together with Active X controls. Now with the 890 they've move to a much cleaner solution where its more of a pure client (although it appears to be done .HTA's it works much better. What was great was I able to login with my 880 account and it smoothly upgraded the account and automatically programmed my new remote based on my 880 configuration. I had the option to not do this, but happy that the Engineers at Logitech took the time to enable the upgrades.
So why move to this remote? One big reason is RF support. The 890 has has a programmable IR repeater and it connects to it via radio frequency. Through this you can control components with the remote that are behind a cabinet. I've used a lot of IR repeaters in the past (like the Hot Red Pro) and this blows them all away. No dropped signals.
Its really nice to be able to hide away the electronics from view.
Like this! :-) With this new remote all of our components are now behind a cabinet (its actually pretty well ventilated so the components are nice and cool) resulting in a really nice clean looking room. The RF support is really nice too in that it doesn't matter where you are pointing the remote and you select a button the IR repeater will pick up the signal via RF. This is really useful for universal remotes when you components located in a variety of places. (no dropped signals).
Really happy with this baby. If you're looking for a great universal remote this is the one.
Postscript: I'm getting a lot of questions via email on how to enable IR support for the Bose units. All of the lifestyle units can be controlled via IR, but you need to enable it. Bose has all of their manuals online in the support section of www.bose.com if you need more details. It is pretty easy though, ensure that your Bose unit has the video output connected to an input unit on your TV and that out put is switched to on your Television. Enter the system menu, by selecting system from the Bose remote. From there you should find an "IR Control" option, turn this on and your system can now receive signals from the Harmony remote. Works great!
technorati tags: harmony+remote, universal+remote
