A REMOTE THAT’S WORTH THE ROW
Logitech’s brilliant device gets things to work in perfect Harmony
Logitech Harmony Elite: Universal Smart Remote
RRP: €349, see www.logitech.com
There’s a lot of feasting to be done at Christmas but there’s also a lot of TV to be watched. A full week of Christmas soap-specials, sport and drama premieres fill our days on the couch.
Watching TV is getting more complicated though. Maybe you have a Saorview box, a Sky box, a Virgin media box and a digital video-recorder all connected to a surround sound system. Most likely all of these slim black boxes have their own remote control – and that’s where the trouble starts. The universal remote control tried to unify the controls for all of these in to a single device but for years universal remotes never quite lived up to the promise: enter the Logitech Harmony Elite which controls your TV experience and other smart-home devices like lights and thermostats.
Logitech’s top-end remote is a powerhouse of smart tech that can be configured to control 15 of your home entertainment devices, replacing all of the remotes with a single Harmony remote. It will recognise thousands of different TVs and home-entertainment boxes, so my mixture of brands and devices, some old, some new, proved unable to flummox the capability of this sleekly crafted update to Logitech’s Harmony range. The box contains the remote, a charging dock, a Harmony Hub and two additional infrared receivers for the remote for extending its range.
Set-up is not a quick process but the intuitive Harmony app for iOS and Android makes the it reasonably straightforward, or you can opt to set it up from your PC or Mac using the included USB cable.
At the heart of the system is the Harmony Hub which actually does the communicating with your devices via Infrared, Bluetooth or Wifi. As you set up the Harmony Elite you add devices to your home’s list, for instance a TV, a cable box and a surround sound system. When the devices are set up and configured, you can select them by tapping on the remote’s touch screen and the Harmony allows you to control the various devices from its single set of buttons. You can add up to 50 favourite TV channels, complete with station icons, to the remote’s home screen. Additionally you can use the Harmony app on your phone or tablet to control the devices, effectively giving you additional remotes for the same device.
There are only a couple of downsides to the Harmony Elite, one of which is the price. You can get other Harmony models for almost half the price and if the smart-home features for Nest or Philips Hue don’t appeal to you yet that’s the best route to go. The other downside is battery life, as if you don’t return the remote to its charging cradle every night you’ll only get a couple of days use from the Elite. That requires some discipline but I’ve decided it’s discipline worth practising, as I really do want to know exactly where this remote is when put my feet up in the evenings.
‘I want to know where this remote is when I put my feet up in the evenings’