Harmony H-659 Universal Dedicated Activity Remote Control

Rating:
Summary: simplify your life
Review: I have a very complex home theater/music system. I used to have to pick up 3 remotes to watch a dvd and set the receiver/tv to the right inputs. Try to teach a ht novice (my girlfriend) how to do that! Now I press "watch a movie" and presto. Online set up is not dificult at all. I made a seperate command to "watch hidef tv" which is also convienent. Again, it sets all the inputs and so on. I would agree with the review below that the paper manual leaves alot to be desired but if you need customer suport call the toll free number and you will get the help you need immediately. Got this at an on line retailer for a very good price, well worth the money. No more "honey, how do you do that?"

Rating:
Summary: Great remote but . . .
Review: I've had this remote for about a week and I'm still getting familiar with it. Overall, it looks like it will do everything I want but it is taking a lot of time to set up.

PROs
* Nice look and feel with protruding buttons that are easy to use in low light
* Very flexible. Can be programmed to do just about anything.
* Very nice screen that can be customized (including text labels) to add the controls that you want if the buttons aren't enough
* Interactive Help on the remote is very useful for fine tuning your setup. For example, if a button is turning a device off when it should be turning on, the Help will help straighten that out quickly.
* Looks like I will be able to do everything in one remote that the four other device-specific remotes do (Sony TV, Dish Network satellite box including PVR features, Panasonic DVD recorder, and Denon Surround system).

CONS
* Very time consuming to get everything set up just right
* Poor documentation. The manual that comes with it is very simplistic and basically just gets you to the point of connecting it to their web site (which is essential to the set up). I would have found it very helpful to read the concept of operation including how the controls are organized, that the default soft buttons are just that--defaults, but they can be modified to anything you want, and other principles of operation. The web site has most of the documentation but I don't think it's well organized. I would much prefer to see the basic ideas on paper so that it can be easily read and reread.
* The web site is not well laid out. I think its confusing.
* Much of the setup is with Wizards which are slow to use (even over T1) with poorly described steps so that often it was not clear what I was being asked about and why.
* Slow to customize. It's taking many hours spread over days to get it to where I want. There is basically a database of functions for each device you have (according to the brand and model) and you assign a function from the database to a key or soft key on the remote control. However, I found that many of the functions don't have the same name as on my physical remote so it was very slow to figure out exactly what function I wanted. For example, on my satellite remote there's a function called Skip Ahead which jumps ahead several seconds if you're watching a recorded program. In the function list the choice is Advance. It took me a while to figure out that Skip Ahead and Advance were the same thing. Maybe it's documented somewhere but I haven't found it. This different use of terms is occurring frequently so it's taking a long time to set it up with the functions I want.
* Some unique and possibily useful features but again, poorly documented. It turns out you can configure a personalized list of TV stations and then download the programing to the remote. When you press the Media button you scroll through an alphabetical list of the programs for what's on in "this hour." Select a program by name and the program is set on the TV. You can download the prgram list up to 14 days ahead so you only have to do dowloads every 2 weeks. I've listed all the premium movie stations so I see an alphabetical list of all the premium movies. We'll, I'd be embaraced to say how long it took me to figure all that out. It also seems marginally useful because it's only displaying what's on "this" hour. It would be more helful to me if I could also see what's comming up the next hour so I can watch a program from the start. Maybe all this is documented somewhere on the web site but I didn't see it. A basic feature list would be very helpful so I'd at least know what Help to look up. Again, I'd like to see that on paper.
* Slow support. I sent an email request about the above several days ago and have not heard back yet. They say there's a 24 hour response time but it's been at least three days. So I figured it out myself.
* When you configure it for a specific device it adds every possible control to the soft buttons. When I looked at those controls they made no sense to me because I never use 95% of them. It took a while but I finally realized that I could delete all the defaults and add just the ones I wanted.

OVERALL
Very nice to use once its set up. However, with flexibility comes complexity and I think there is a lot of room for improvement in the documentation and their web site (which is essential for configuring) as far as usability is concerned. If you have several devices and are looking for a fast easy solution this may not be it. But if you have some time and patience then this is a great solution.