Remember Logitech's
Harmony Adapter for PS3? How could you forget, right? Turns out a similar device is shipping alongside the company's fresh Harmony 900 remote, as it seeks to turn RF signals into IR commands that components in your AV rack can understand. The device ships with an IR blaster and two "mini blasters," all of which work together in order to get crucial instructions from your remote to devices neatly hidden behind closed doors. The remote itself packs a full color touchscreen and can pull down codes for over 225,000 devices, and there's also a rechargeable battery and a base station to keep things juiced up when not in use. As with most
Harmony remotes, this setup definitely won't run you cheap, with the entire kit getting priced at $399.99 when it ships later this month.
Update: Looks like CNET
has a review up, and we'd say the bottom line pretty much sums it up: "
The Logitech Harmony 900 is, hands down, the best universal remote control we've ever tested."
posted August 11th 2009 4:00AM
This is one for the wives and girlfriends so they can hide that ugly home built media center PC behind closed doors.
sweet tanning glasses
Gorgeous! But I wonder how many units they are gonna sell.
I have, until now, ne'er yearned for you as I do this day, my Harmony. Your piano black finish has me in a-swoon. As does your willing to love all who are within your sight, be they Sony, or Onkyo, or Samsung. Yet the price I must pay is beyond my meager holdings. I cannot afford thee in my pocket, yet I cannot afford not to love thee in my heart.
Damn you, o tag with price so lofty. Damn you!
Get a Harmony ONE. It's very similar, works great, has *much* better buttons than the other Harmony Remotes, the same software and touch screen and is usually on sale. Bought one six months ago and no regrets (blows away a previous 880 I had).
@Jim
I think this is a newer version of the One. It looks identical except this one has the red, green, yellow, and blue buttons added.
Crap Gadget... a $400 crap gadget...Who the hell spends 4 bills on a remote. people are so f-cking ass-backwards...
The Harmony One is a POS as far as I'm concerned. The 880 was so much better until mine died.
The IR receiver is horrible and requires everything to be absolutely perfect. The IR transmitter isn't nearly as powerful as the 880 (or even the 659) and requires much better line of sight.
If I didn't get such a good deal on it, I'd definitely have returned it.
Have the Harmony One on order. With the 900 coming soon, the Harmony One took a $50 dive in price. Gigity Gigity.
That's exactly what I was hoping for. :)
Wait, where did you see it drop in price?
"The Logitech Harmony 900 is, hands down, the best universal remote control we've ever tested."
Strong words. Even after seeing that I'm still too cheap to invest in a proper uni-remote.
If your needs and budget are modest (eg. you don't need the extenders, a colour screen or control of a PS3) then get the Harmony 525 instead.
It's £59.99 in the UK, probably about $60 in the USA considering the sucky exchange rate that sellers work to.
i want one so bad, but I just can't convince myself that I need a $400 remote control. I'm trying though.
Don't really see the diffrence between this one and harmony one, but maybe thats just me.
Did you READ the article???
it's just you
What? IR? Not BT?
FAIL!
Too many IR remotes and not enough (any) Bluetooth ones in the market.
Other then PS3 what AV Equipment uses BT ? Not very many
Aside from the PS3, I can't name a single piece of AV gear with a BT remote. I'd rather not pay extra for every single universal remote in the future just to have additional support for one device. Logitech sells a box that will convert IR to BT for those PS3 owners that want this anyway.
For an extra $60, they will sell you a Bluetooth option.
This is much better than my current Harmony. I have been using it for the last couple of years and I am stil not used to it's strange shape and botton positioning.
But I wont upgrade though, this thing costs!
I own a Harmony ONE it is the best remote ever .. this may be better but not enough of a change for me to upgrade .. but if you haven't jumped on the Harmony One train now is the time when the prices will undoubtedly drop
I like what it does .. to bad i already bought the Powermid X-10 PM5900 receivers a couple years ago .. pretty much does the same thing
Meh.. for $400, I'll get up to turn shit off.
That's not really the problem. The reason for these fancy remotes is so that the wives of gadget fiends can operate complicated systems with disparate components with the minimum effort.
Hmm.. glad my girlfriend is a nerd too then lol.
I'm with Level 5.... I have a 8 in 1 remote with learn capabilities that cost me $20. pricing is reflective to the idiots that buy into them.
GadgetGeek, Level 5, you really wouldn't know unless you've owned one for a while. It doesn't matter how well you know the system, a Harmony remote can make it very easy to control. To completely dismiss it because it's too expensive or to "easy" is ignorant.
Of course, when I say this, I'm referring to the Harmony One (~$150). $400 is expensive, but if you really need it, you probably have a lot more invested in your other gear.
My Wife complains that we have 6 Remotes(Cablebox, Home Theater System, TV, PS3, Xbox360, HTPC) if I had this that would shut her up as far as having so many remotes but then she would complain about the cost.....lol
Damn I want one of these
Does it allow multiple room controls, where , say, you have three identical Sonys in different rooms
and want to control only one? . A Universal Remote remote can do this with UHF extenders. I've not seen a Harmony that has this ability.
Actually, you can do that, not only with this one, but with the older Harmony 890 as well. In the setup, you can direct your commands to a specific wireless extender instead of sending it to all of them at once.
Well if i ever get a media rack I know which remote i'm getting. For now I love my ONE. Definitely the best harmony out there, and now one for the RF people. Now I just need the PS3 adapter to make it complete. But every time i go to BB i think, damn $60, I guess I Can live with the PS3 remote to hit 2-3 buttons. When it runs out of batterys though i'll probably get it hahah
Definitely love my "One" as well. I found the PS3 adapter to be well worth it. It streamlines things considerably as I don't have to fumble around in the dark trying to hit the correct buttons on my PS3 remote.
I will be purchasing the 900 as soon as it is available for my master bedroom as I am putting the a/v gear in my walk-in. Then I'll get another when I move my great room equipment into the basement and run the picture/sound back upstairs...it makes the wife happy!
So how is this remote different from the Harmony 880 and the RF Extender Logitech has been selling the last couple of years?
I'm disappointed there's only room for 3 activities on the first page of the remote. I regularly use 5 activities on my 890 so I'd have to click to get to the second page. Why not just make those big ass buttons smaller to get 2 columns and 6 activities?
Oh and WTF happened to Z-Wave support? The 890 is the last remote that Harmony put out with Z-Wave and I can't upgrade until they release a new z-wave remote.
I have a Harmony One and had another Harmony before it and I hate HATE the touchscreen interface. The problem is restricted to the IR version. Think about it, you can't feel around a touchscreen trying to find the right button. This means you have to point the remote up to see what you're going to press, zero in on the button, then use a second hand to press the button while pointing the remote at the receiving device. It is just a terrible idea made worse by the fact that the LCD is mounted so far back from the surface of the remote there are wicked parallax issues when sighting down the remote in a normal operating mode.
Combine that with the fact that there are only something like 10 icons you can assign to the LCD buttons (as opposed to just text labels). It really is a shitty remote for the price when compared to one of their lower end models.
That said, the rest of the hard buttons are very well laid out, and the shape of the remote is very comfortable. This one appears to have 4 extra hard buttons over the One, which means I can probably ignore the LCD altogether. Also it is RF so no more issues with which way the remote is pointing. Definitely an improvement, but I'd prefer if they ditched the touchscreen for real buttons.
I had a harmony before and didn't like the way it is programmed. Also, I don't know if they changed it but it used to try to keep track of whether you had the component turned on or off. It never would seem to get it right.
I've been happy with my MX-900 for years. Only thing I don't like is it not being rechargable. They have newer models that I would prefer to have but there is no reason for me to upgrade.
I'm digging the additional color-coded buttons they added above the directional pad.
But for $400.. I'll stick with my Harmony One. Which I love..
It replaced 5 remotes and effectively cured my westinghouse flat panel's caveat of having one button marked "DVI" to cycle between DVI1 - HTPC, DVI2 - HR20, and HDMI - PS3.
This thing costs as much (or more) than any of the major appliances it will be controlling.
I have a Logitech remote and it is already starting to malfunction. While functionality and compatibility is great, in my own personal experience, workmanship has not.
The buttons are really thin and plastick-y. They click and soon enough stop working. I have the Logitech Harmony 880 and it lasted me about a year before the buttons stopped responding.
Volume up doesn't work but volume down does. The screen is fading on one side and the charger clicks on and off sporadically. It beeps at night when it disconnects itself.
I don't know if this model is the same, but I'm not personally going to toss $400 more at them to find out. The reviews were great for the 880 so I would be hesitant to do it again based on reviews.
Get your hands on the physical product and feel those buttons before you buy it!
and people complain that the PS3 is expensive.
The PS3 at least has over $400 worth of technology inside. If this remote has over $20 in guts I would be surprised. Yeah but it controls my TV, AV gear, DVR, and DVD player. I can also program a macro that will turn eveything on and set it exactly how I like it.
I would still say, IT"S A FRICKIN REMOTE CONTROL.
Not sure who would pay 400$ for a remote, but its up for preorder now:
http://bountii.com/product-4248-logitech-harmony-900-universal-remote.html
do want
X10 has the same type of "see-through" device for $20... Little overpriced even with the remote.
http://www.x10.com/promotions/pm5900_ed_conceal.html
*All* $400 Harmony remotes that don't include the PS3 adapter are a complete failure in my eye...as is the PS3 adapter at $79. I have 2 Harmony 659's that work perfectly for everything - except the PS3 of course - and each cost me $35. I still think the right price point for the adapter was half the price it is currently selling for...
Having been in the beta testing group for this remote, I can say it's worth every penny...
The article doesn't even touch on most of the improvements/additions from the One.
Screen resolution is much improved. A lot more of the settings are changeable on the remote itself (theme, font size the ENTIRE RF setup, etc...). The remote now features a sleep timer (it executes the 'off' button function after a set duration...many choices available ranging from 15 minutes to 3 hours). No need to connect the 'blaster' (what they're now calling the RF extender) for updates, they're handled wirelessly from the remote after the remote is updated. The new blaster works on the ECNet RF protocol (2.4ghz frequency), meaning less RF interference from baby monitors and so on. The 900 also supports up to 5 main blasters (and each can have the mini-blasters plugged in as well. The range on the main blasters is huge. I have one positioned in the center of a very wide shelf. The components assigned to it are at least 4-5 inches behind it, and 12-18 inches to the side of it. It can basically fire on a backwards angle.
In short, the remote rocks. For the record, I've used the 880, One, 890 w/extender, 510, 1100 w/extender and the 900 w/ blasters
Oh, and stop criticizing universal remote companies for not including BT for one device from one company that was too cheap to include a very inexpensive IR receiver on their 'center of all entertainment device'. You would have thought that they would have learned from their PS2 experience. It was a game console that could play dvds, but they didn't include an IR receiver on their initial build. Later builds, they put one in. So of course, when they made the PS3, they went and did the same thing...but this time so that you would be 'forced' to buy their BT remote accessory. It was a money grab attempt by Sony...that's the epic FAIL!
Hopefully they have fixed the charging station from the previous models.....
I own a Harmony 720 it's a great remote and until recently I didn't need a sleep function. So I went to the setup software to add this basic button. to my surprise no such function exists. This is as basic a function as you can have in a universal remote. I've seen posting for workarounds but they leave your remote out if synch. I've seen post extolling the NEW HARMONY 900 which has this function WOW $400 to add 1 function that should have been there already. Let me say I could build a single purpose robot that could physically push the power button for $400. If Logitech wants to charge everyone for this programming then do so I’ll pay $10 to get something I should already have but if that’s what it takes so be it.
In “Their” defense there is nothing on the packaging that’s says this function is available, then again there is nothing that says it not, this is because I as well as many of U expected the function to be there in the 1st place. I may buy a new remote and it may cost $400 but it won’t be a Logitech if they won’t stand up and make right what is clearly a wrong.
Normally I would recommend that if you feel as I do that this function should be there you should send them an email requesting politely that a firmware upgrade B made adding a sleep mode function to all their existing remotes that have internal timers (they all do). Include in the text that they clearly already have the programming code (from the HARMONY 900) and modifying it for the existing remotes would be very easy. Like I said NORMALLY that is what I would recommend except I can’t find anywhere what the customer support email address is. I even tried Googling to find it but no such luck I did find a toll free number for sales it is 800-231-7717 call them and again respectfully request the firmware change. If enough people call their toll free number (Call often) they may get the hint. I’m sure they will delete this message soon so please take action now.