Logitech Harmony 550 Universal Remote

Control your entire Home Entertainment system with just one button! Simply select an activity and your Harmony remote will send the right commands so you don't have to juggle remotes or remember a sequence of buttons. The Internet-based setup on the Harmony 550 is a breeze, making home entertainment accessible to the whole family.

I have never owned a universal remote before (other than the ones from the cable company), and let me tell this is an amazing little thing. The "activities"-based control is a great example of good design--instead of telling it which device you want to control, you just tell it what you want to do and it figures out how. Want to watch TV? It turns on the TV and the cable box, picks the correct input on the TV, and allows you to adjust the TV volume and the cable box's channel. Want to watch a DVD? It turns on the TV and the DVD player, and the controls work similarly with them. Instead of pushing 20 buttons on three remotes, you push about 4 on one. The only trick is the setup, but even that is pretty easy through the computer interface. You tell it what model equipment you have, download it into the remote (using a standard mini-USB cable that comes included) and the controls all work for that equipment. Maybe I will sour on this thing eventually, maybe it will break after a week, or maybe a comet will hit my house. But for now, I really like this thing.

had the product for a few months. quite happy with it. successfully replaced the remotes for the following: * jvc dvd player * samsung tv * onkyo receiver * sharp vcr * motorola cable box also use it to set tv/receiver/power on-off modes for: * apple tv * sony ps2 product exceeded my expectations. has very fine tuning capability. my samsung tv has a crappy reaction time to its own remote so once in a while the modes do not change directly, and i have to use a few additional steps on the remote. but it passed the wife and guest tests :) so that's saying a lot for ease of use. the text is a little hard to read in the blue backlighting. also i didn't think too much about it, but having the buttons lit is an useful feature that it lacks. other than that it's great!

The logitech harmony remote makes controlling multiple components very easy. Once the remote has been set up, anyone ca use a complex home heater system.

yes, programming this remote is very simple and very easy to use. It only took me about half an hour to set up maybe less. I was very impressed with how the unit interfaced with everything. That said, within two weeks the bottom of the LCD display started to not display properly and I've only had this product for a little over a month and I've already had to replace the batteries. I would recommend going one step higher! I think I'm going to try

It took me about 15 minutes to set this product up to control my receiver, tv, and DVD player. The controls are very intuitive and my wife is very happy that there is only one control to deal with.