Logitech Harmony Remote [Update]

I have not given up on my new remote yet and I'm glad I didn't. (If you don't know what I'm talking about check out my origional post). After calling Harmony support and not getting much help I posted my questions in their forums and one of the other members there was cool enough to tell me how to trick the remote into doing what I want it to.

Basically, if you make a custom button for a specific device (in my case it is for my receiver) the remote will put that button on any activities that use that device. My problem was that I did not want the button when I use my Xbox 360 even though I do use the receiver with it. Thanks to WannabeActuary over in the Harmony forums I found out that I can trick the remote by telling it the buttons are actually for my TiVo and not the receiver. That way they only show up when I want them to.

My love/hate relationship with the remote has become a love-only relationship. I'm now giving it 2 thumbs up. In addition to getting the buttons how I want with this little trick I was able to add a bunch of other cool options to the custom buttons.

Logitech Harmony Remote for Xbox 360 Review

My "relationship" with my new Harmony remoteis quickly becoming a Love/Hate relationship. I call it a relationship because I spent more time with the remote Saturday than I did with my family. It started off so innocently. I finally got around to getting a surround sound system and I did not want to have to use 2 remotes just to watch TV. So, I did a little research and found a great price for the Logitech Harmony Remote for Xbox 360. I ordered it on sale on Amazon for $40 off the list price. Apparently I was not the only one because it was back ordered for a month.

It finally arrived last week and I was pretty excited. For those of you who are not familiar with Harmony remotes, you connect it to a computer. You then tell it all of the components in your entertainment center. The software that comes with it then walks you though how you use your entertainment center and programs the remote for you. When you're done with the setup you have buttons labeled things like "Play Xbox 360" and "Watch TiVo." When you hit the button it turns of all the required components and sets everything to your preferred setup for that activity.

In theory it is a great way to control an entertainment center. In practice once I finish walking through the setup I found a lot of little things I wanted to tweak. First it was the button layout. Then, how quickly my TiVo will respond to the remote. As a tech/gadget geek I had fun tweaking all the settings to get it exactly how I want it ... at first. After a couple hours of tweaking I got to the point where I could not get the software to layout the buttons for when I use my Xbox 360 the way I wanted. The strange this was that I had the layout almost identical to the buttons for watching TV and those work fine. After another hour or so of trying to change things to get it to do the layout how I wanted I gave up and emailed Logitech support for help. That was Saturday afternoon.

Today I called Logitech support to ask the same questions because I never got an email response. After about 15 minutes on the phone I found out that I can't force the remote to do the button layout the way I want for the Xbox 360. The reason I was given was because that is how the remote works. I'm not really satisfied with the answer, but it seems to be the truth. The remote just will not let me put the buttons where I want them when the 360 is one of the components being controlled. Hopefully they fix that with a future update.

So, is it really worth all the time I spent setting it up the remote verses just using the 2 remotes? I'm not sure yet. It is nice to have just one remote to do everything, but for a remote that is suppose to be fully customizable it is annoying to find that it is only mostly customizable. I'm going to give the remote 1 thumb up for now, but reserve the right to raise it to two thumbs up if I get the button layout how I want it.