I’ve been setting up a bit of a decent music/video system (for those that get a kick out of specs: Denon AVR-2106 receiver, 2x KEF iQ-5 front, Tannoy Mercury FC center, my old Philips bookshelf 3-way speakers for rear, and a cheapo Daewoo CRT 28″ - don’t fall for the TFT scam if you have the space for a decent CRT and don’t need high-definition TV). With the digital terrestial broadcasting set-top box, the (cheapo) DVD player and the iPod dock I found myself drowning in remote controls.

Enter the Logitech Harmony line of remotes. A remote with a USB connection, able to “learn” from an on-line database containing tens of thousands of devices. It is activity-based, so after programming, you say “I want to watch a DVD” and it switches on DVD, Receiver and TV, adjusts everything to the correct inputs, and presses “play” on the DVD.

Great idea, and now that I have completed the initial setup it looks like it works “as advertised” (lots of buttons, lots of options, so lots of fiddling left, but it looks like I can do the basic stuff without going to the OEM remotes).

However, Logitech really needs to get its act together around the “initial user experience”. First, the packaging - the dreaded blister. I still need to succesfully open the first blister package without damaging either myself or the contents. Compare this to the previous goodie I unpacked - the iPod dock which arrived in a nicely designed, easily openable carton package, and it is easy to see that I was in love with Apple and angry with Logitech after retrieving the contents from their respective wrappers. In fact, I was pissed off with Logitech, because even the included USB cable had a hard-to-open plastic wrapper around it. Why in heaven’s name, the blister should provide adequate protection, no?

I ran a quick demo setup on the Harmony website a couple of weeks ago, so I re-used that account when installing the software on my laptop. It didn’t have a complete configuration so I tried to add devices, which didn’t work - it resulted in dumb error messages. Also, the “upgrade” from the account from demo to real when I reverted to the web version of the software didn’t work, I couldn’t get out of the stupid wizard mode, etcetera. In other words, the software sucks even more than the packing. Again, software-wise, I point to Apple where I could witness the first boot of a Macbook Pro last week. Nuff said…

The end result: I’m moderately happy with the remote. It does its job. It didn’t do anything to make me happy beyond it - just another mediocre product from a mediocre manufacturer that doesn’t care about brand loyalty. I could have been excited by the device because the functionality is impressive, but that has been more than offset by the blatant disinterest of Logitech for creating a nice out-of-the-box experience.

In the meantime, I bicycle on my way to work past an Apple Center every day. Every day, my credit card itches more when I see the kit on display there. Why? Because every time I buy an Apple product, it shows that Apple does its darnest best to make me happy. That is what creates brand loyalty, and that’s why I really really hope that Apple will enter this particular market. I’ll ditch the Harmony the very second they announce a programmable home theatre remote.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Kitchensink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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