Logitech Harmony Xbox 360 Remote
by Logitech
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Our Price: $239.99 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $125.00 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Logitech Harmony Xbox 360 Remote
Customer Review: I love my Harmony remotes
Summary: 5 Stars
First off, as a brand, Harmony remotes are excellent. This model is a great value and highly recommended. I can't see any real reason to buy one of the more expensive Harmony's, which are mostly bulkier and have features that to me do not justify the price (color screen, for example).
These remotes can be setup to do nearly anything you want, including complicated timing adjustments. There are more configurable remotes available (JP1 compatible remotes), cheaper remotes that can still control multiple devices, and remotes with lots of advanced (but largely useless) features. But the 5XX (the 360 remote is basically a 5XX but with colored/lettered buttons) series of Harmony remotes offer, in my opinion, the best value and combination of features. They look good, they are easy to setup, they are adjustable enough for nearly any circumstance you can imagine, and they function intuitively. Whereas on other remotes you might hit a series of buttons to watch a DVD (TV, Source, Source, Source, DVD, Power, Play) on the Harmony you hit two buttons: "Activities" and then a soft button such as "Watch a DVD." This, in addition to the other features, makes it a steal. And rather than having to read through, input, and test a bunch of device codes, setup means simply typing the model of your equipment into your computer and uploading the device profiles over USB cable to the remote. For me, this is excellent, because it's fast and easy. If you don't have a computer with internet access, this will be a deal killer for you and you should look at another option.
I have the 520 in my bedroom and the 360 in my living room. Here's my recommendation on choosing: think about what special buttons you need. If you just need basic buttons such as play, channel, volume, etc., just get the 520. It's the cheapest in the line and will likely meet your needs. If you have a TV or Satellite/Cable box that has colored or lettered buttons on the factory remote, you'll appreciate the buttons on the 360. It offers a real benefit over the 550, which has roughly the same number of buttons, but not necessarily the most useful ones. I was torn between the 550 and 360, and ultimately it comes down to the colored buttons. As for buying more expensive Harmony remotes, I didn't see any compelling reasons, as the 5XX/360 series works great.
Customer Review: Great Product
Summary: 5 Stars
So we had gotten a new home entertainment system, and I was in multiple remote hell. So I bought this remote based off reputation, and boy did it stand up to it.
First of all, I like to think that I am fairly tech savy, and for the traditional person, this remote would have been a breeze to set up. However, I have a few components that are newer to the market, so they were not listed in thier database. After trying to manual configure it for 4 hours, I gave up and called customer support. This was one of the more positive experiences of my life.
The tech walked me through setting up my remote, as well as programed my remote on the back end to work the way I wanted it to. And now, my sound system (Sound On WHT-510) and my Netflix box (Roku) are a part of thier permenant database for everyone to use. Which I think is a great tool.
The great thing about this remote is the one function to turn everything to where it needs to be. As all the other reviews have mentioned, this feature makes life so much easier. Although I have noticed that you do have to be patient, as the remote can only send one command at a time. So if you are changing inputs on the tv, powering up your dvd player and swtiching inputs on your reciever, it has to process those commands in order. My biggest suggestion is to hit the button, set the remote down and let it run. In reality, it takes about 5 seconds.
I will say there is only one drawback, which I noted other people had mentioned. The remote is only fat at the back end where the batteries are. Which is expected. I would have prefered the remote be same size all the way through. It just feels more natural to me that way. The keys do make a clicking noise that I am not used too, but that is something that I will easily overlook just for the fact that I can put all my other remotes in a drawer.
I would recommend getting rechargable batteries for this remote. Or at least setting the backlight to be less than 20 seconds. I don't know how long they will last, but the remote is always on, so I can imagine that it will eat them pretty fast. A nice feature would be a sleep function on the remote to save batteries. In all honesty, I use rechargable all the time anyway, so I will regardless.
Customer Review: I love this remote, but its not perfect... I still give it 5 stars though-see why
Summary: 5 Stars
This Logitech Harmony 360 remote really does allow you to replace all your other remotes. Its great. So, what's not perfect about it?
First, some of the buttons are hard to press, especially those next to the screen. Second, obviously there isn't enough room on the remote for a button to correspond with every remote out there. So some remote functions will be listed on the screen and you may have to page through several functions to find the one you're looking for. For one of my devices, I have 9 pages of functions. That can be tedious. Also, in some instances, a particular function on the screen may come up in a different location from time to time so that you can't count on memorizing which button it is on a page. Bothersome.
Those things would knock this remote down to 4 stars or less if not for one thing. When you program this remote, you program activity macros for your hardware. In my case, that means that when I select the activity "Watch HD TV" (you can name these functions yourself) and press just that ONE button, it turns on my HD TV and sets it to the correct input, my A/V Home Theater Receiver with the correct input setting and my HD DVR. Not only that, it knows that I want to adjust the volume through the television, but change the channels through the DVR. I even have some activities that are more complicated than that one.
It works great. That macro capability allowing me to turn on everything with just one button bumps it back up to 5 stars in my book.
Oh, and one other nice thing about it... it doesn't have to be pointed at your equipment. For instance, when turning on all the equipment for watching the HD TV prior to this remote, I had to use 3 remotes. The TV and DVR remotes were pretty straight forward, but for the Home Theater Receiver, I'd have to hold it way up over my head because the receiver was blocked from my view by the coffee table. With the Harmony 360 remote, I don't have to do that. It turns them all on even when there's no line-of-sight to the equipment. Pretty much works no matter how I hold it. And when I'm ready to turn everything off, I just hit the power button at the top of the remote and everything shuts down.
So, for me, this was a very worthwhile purchase.
Customer Review: Pleasantly surprised!
Summary: 5 Stars
Everyone who's tried to watch TV, play Xbox 360, play Wii, watch a movie etc. at my house has complained about all the remotes. I've resisted getting a universal remote because the ones I've tried in the past never worked well enough for me to put the other remotes away. I've heard good things about Logitech's Harmony remotes, but they are kind of pricey. When I started streaming movies on my Xbox 360, I decided to check out the Harmony remotes again. Well for $69 the Harmony for Xbox 360 seemed perfect.
Setting it up was a breeze. It now controls these devices:
Mitsubishi TV, Pioneer AV Receiver, TiVo PVR, Motorola Digital Cable Box, Philips DVD player, and XBox 360. I added my Nintendo Wii, but unfortunately Nintendo uses bluetooth so the Harmony can't control it. On the plus side, I was able to create an "Activity" for playing Wii which changes the TV's video source properly.
Speaking of Activities, this feature works great. As you would expect choosing an activity like "Watch DVD", turns on the TV, makes sure it is on the right video source, turns on the AV receiver, makes sure it's on the right audio source, and turns on the DVD player. Each activity will have the right combination of buttons controlling the various devices correctly. For instance, after choosing the "Watch DVD" activity, the volume buttons control the AV receiver and the navigation buttons control the DVD player. Also, the LCD screen displays custom soft keys pertaining to watching DVDs (Eject, Chap+, Chap-, Zoom, Subtitle, Audio, etc).
The software works really well. After you enter your devices and choose the activities you want programmed, it walks you through updating the remote. Customizing devices, activities, buttons, etc. is really easy. The default activities work great, but I've been tweaking quite a bit. The software saves all of your configuring so if you have to replace or upgrade your remote you can just transfer your settings.
As you can tell, I really like this product. It has made my life so much easier (and visiting TV watchers happy too).
Customer Review: Great purchase!
Summary: 5 Stars
Definitely a worthwhile purchase! I have a pretty complicated A/V system because my rear-projection TV only has one HDMI jack, and my stereo isn't an HDMI switch, so I need to have an HDMI video switch in the mix and have all of my audio go into the stereo through two optical jacks and a coax. Nobody in my family but me could figure out how to set everything up previously! With this remote, however, the "activities" make it simple enough that even my 6 year old daughter can go from PS3 mode to "watch TV" mode with no issues. Also, it's only taken a couple of weeks to be able to use the controller by touch without looking at it - that's good ergonomics!
It *did* take a little while to get working close to the way I wanted, and I haven't finished yet, but it's still ten times better than having all the separate remotes. I think I could greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to turn things on from scratch, which is the only way it could be better, since the only issue family members sometimes have using the remote is not leaving it pointed at everything long enough for the remote to turn everything on and get to the right inputs. Still - huge improvement in media usability with this remote!
The only thing that doesn't work perfectly, and this is completely the fault of Sony, not Harmony/Logitech, is that the PS3 is wireless blue-tooth, not infra-red, so you can't control the PS3 at all without getting a third-party solution. Again, not a big deal, just don't expect to be able to watch movies on your PS3 without getting either an infra-red adapter (which I believe still can't turn the PS3 on and off) or a third party box. I can watch movies on either xbox360 or PS3, so this doesn't bother me, but if you only have a PS3, expect to have to buy more hardware. Again - completely the fault of Sony for not making the PS3 more IR compatible. I'd still buy it in a heartbeat if you have significant others or kids who have trouble using your A/V system!