The Temple of Dagon

Style- This is one slick looking-remote. The 680 is gray and had a lot of buttons Matt McGloin Jersey , so it looks like something you could run a power plant with by remote. The Harmony One, which from this point will be referred to as the One, has fewer buttons and relies on a touch screen on the upper portion of the remote to make up for the fewer buttons. The buttons are also larger than on the 680, helpful for those with larger fingers. The One is black with a flash of gray at the bottom. The black is actually in two flavors because of the material of the remote. The top is shiny, while the bottom is flat. This is visually appealing, but you'll find in a few seconds that the shiny black plastic and the touchscreen LOVE oil, so fingerprints accumulate quickly. It's like a forensics dream piece of evidence! They do include a cleaning cloth for the remote, but I don't really want to have to clean a remote after every use. I will admit though, once I realized that the remote picked up gunk like that, I was a little more precise when using the touchscreen and buttons so that I wasn't grabbing and poking around as much. So far it has only needed to be cleaned on occasion instead of every 10 minutes. The weight of the remote is nice. My 680 is definitely heavier, but that's because the 680 uses 4 AAA batteries. The One uses a rechargeable battery, so that drops the weight a fair amount. Fortunately, it isn't too light; you still feel like you're holding a solid remote that can withstand a short fall (and how many times in your life have you dropped a remote, maybe 100). The touchscreen is nice and bright and large enough to see everything easily. The default settings do a good job of spacing things out so that you can easily hit the important spots. You can modify a fair amount of things on the remote, including how the touchscreen looks. I haven't played with this function, but I am sure that certain settings look much better than others. For me, the default settings are fine. The buttons are a nice size and feel good when pressed. I've had some cheap remotes that, when you press a button, the button "jiggles", feeling like it could e off at any moment. The 680 buttons always felt good, and the One buttons are on par with that, if not slightly better. One thing I do like is that the wheel button around the OK button on the 680 was replaced with four arrow buttons surrounding the OK button. That's actually easier I think to use than the circle. Overall verdict- some very nice visual features, but the fingerprint effect is strong. It is easily on par with what people have experienced with the iPod touchscreen. Relatively speaking, it is a minor distraction, but when you're spending this much for a remote, it is something to pay attention to. Other than that, the remote definitely would look good as part of any home entertainment system. Grade: B Setup- I was very lucky here; I already had a Harmony remote, so setup was less than 20 minutes for me (that's from unpacking the box to sitting on the couch and using the remote with all the settings correct). I'll run through two versions of the setup process, my experience and what most users will experience. All of these harmony remotes use your puter to set everything up, pulling remote control codes form their huge database of codes and loading those codes into the harmony remote. So you'll need a puter with a USB port and a good internet connection with these remotes. If you own a harmony remote already (my situation), you have two options; you can move your current account from your old harmony remote to the new one or you can create a new account for the new remote. I chose to move my account over, since I didn't plan on having two remotes for the same set of systems and didn't want to go through the whole setup process again for the new remote (I just wanted to start using this puppy!). Moving the account over was simple; I plugged in the One and the logitech software asked me if I wanted to make a new account for this remote or transfer my current account to this remote. I told it to the transfer the account, watched it find the remote, and came back five minutes later after it had loaded all of the settings into the remote. I unplugged it, took it to my system, and tried it out. All the settings were fine, but I didn't like the order of some of the buttons on the touchscreen, so I went back and made some changes. After another five minutes to upload my changes to the remote, it was totally ready to go. As you can see, it was a very fast process for programming a universal remote. If you are a new harmony user, you'll need to do a few things that will make the setup take longer. First, you'll need to download the newest version of logitech's remote software. The One does e with the newest version (version 7.4 I believe), but considering how quickly updates to software can e out, your safer bet is to just go to the logitech website and download the current software. Once you've done that, go through the installation and just follow the steps to create an account and add in all of your equipment that you want the remote to control. I should mention that whenever you make changes to the remote through the software (which I believe is the only way to do it), you'll have to log on to the logitech website to do it, so be prepared for that. It's not a bad idea to write down the product codes for everything and take them over to the puter (logitech even includes a spot in the manual for writing all that down), then you don't have to do as much running back and forth between the puter and your stuff. Once you've got everything in the software, you may have to do some tweaking, so have the remotes handy for those devices if possible. I ran into a couple of devices that the software didn't have codes for and needed to get those from the original remote. Once you've got everything in the system, hook up the remote and it will.