right as soon as i opened it i actually found the packaging even for the harmony
ultimate which is basically a harmony
ultimate one and a harmony hub in a single package a little intimidating
with all the space-age looking pieces and wires staring me down when i first
opened it up my wife actually disagreed but i guess with the kinds of packages
she encounters on a daily basis it takes more than some 7-inch battery-powered
gizmo to get her riled up
with the purchase of a qualifying Intel processor SSD or nuk you could instantly
win an Intel gaming jersey and be entered in the draw for the ultimate
system click now to learn more okay so now that we've all recovered from my
terrible opening joke the first step to getting this baby going is to create an
account for myharmony.com and download the app for your pc which
lets you import settings from your hypothetical previous harmony remote
it detects compatible devices on the network like sonos audio gear and nest
thermostats then helps you manually add your other devices by part number by the
way i'd recommend searching the database for your gear before investing in a
remote to avoid some unpleasant surprises at this stage then once your
devices are added it guides you through setting up activities so you choose what
you want to do let's say watch pc for example then you pick out all the
devices and inputs that are associated with that activity and in theory when
you trigger the activity on the remote all the appropriate stuff should turn on
and everything else should be off all right so
obviously this isn't going to do anything here so let's go on a field trip to see
how it all works in the real world alright so here we are at my house my
devices are a samsung 52 inch not smart so i guess a dumb tv a Windows media
center pc with the microsoft dongle for
ir i've also got an onkyo receiver a wii
and a ps4 as well as a chromecast plugged into the back of the receiver so
i added the chromecast on the ps4 just to make this video a little bit more
interesting so front and center right here is the harmony hub it's an ir
blaster and rf receiver it's a wi-fi
client i'm pretty sure it's got bluetooth too the objective is for it to
be able to pick up an rf signal from the remote and blast the other ones mostly
ir to everything that the remote wants to control now ir signals will bounce
around and often hit whatever they need to but if you have a door in front of
your device or for whatever reason it can't hit it you can use one of the two
included mini ir blasters in order to
amplify the signal or reposition it i found that the hub couldn't hit my
receiver normally but actually positioning a mini blaster here and here
took care of it so everything is able to be hit so let's change gears for a
second and have a look at the remote it sits in a handy little charging dock and
has your standard media control buttons on top navigation buttons on the bottom
and then some programmable buttons on the very bottom the middle is dominated
by a touch screen that turns on when you pick up the device with an accelerometer
you can use that to tweak many of the settings that otherwise you'd use the my
harmony application to change and then sync to the remote it's a process that
takes about 20 to 30 seconds from here you can turn off the annoying lock
screen and even more importantly use it to launch your activities and execute
context appropriate commands that are a bit more complicated than play or volume
up all right so enough with the let's click watch pc
it turns on the tv changes the input powers up the receiver and finally wakes
the computer from sleep then if i press exit once it's actually done completely
waking up it shuts the whole thing back down now
for devices like the playstation 4 and chromecast they'll still rely on their
own remotes so a controller or a phone
to wake up but i still find configuring them with the harmony ultimate extremely
useful because it lets you make much better use of the available inputs on
your setup now so let's go ahead and turn it off
my receiver only has two HDMI inputs but
with one button i can mix and match tv
HDMI inputs and receiver audio inputs now in a way that would normally be
pretty cumbersome to navigate and involve changing inputs here then
changing inputs here making sure the volumes are leveled and all that kind of
stuff so i'm using the playstation 4 that way with an HDMI input on the tv
and then an optical audio in set to i think cd or something like that because
who still has cds on the receiver i'm sure someone does and i'm very sorry
okay so looks awesome right well hold on don't throw your money at the screen
yet it took a lot of tinkering to get it this way first of all and i must be an
idiot right when i wanted to add my pc i
clicked add a pc instead of entering the
part number of my ir receiver or
manually searching for microsoft media center se or something like that it took
30 minutes with tech support to figure out why my pc wasn't getting any
commands but at least there's good news and that's that if you do the media
center se trick you can bind your programmable buttons to commands like
alt f4 or other shortcut keys so that i can use this handy little sound
switching app that i have to switch between my speakers and my wireless
headphones so that's kind of cool so then i set out to get the wii working
and i ran into challenge number two the default timing for tv input switching
would cause it to fail so here i'm going to go ahead i'm going to switch to the wii right now would cause it to fail to
switch if i powered the whole thing off
while i was on a different input and fired up a different activity and then switched to the wii so i had to increase
the power delay time from 8.5 to 12
seconds to make this work every time not a huge deal just not amazingly user
friendly challenge number three was getting it to work with the wii as
advertised beyond just setting the right inputs at all i looked at every guide i
can find and i still can't figure out how to connect to it via bluetooth so
the harmony hub can actually power it on instead of me having to do it manually
but truthfully i'm not even sure if i want to because i'll always need a
wiimote to use the thing anyway and apparently some games require the remote
to be unbound in order to work anyway so
you're going to be constantly switching which ties into my last challenge just
because something is supported doesn't mean it's not a bit janky i don't have a
nest or philips hue lighting system so i can't comment on those but the sonos
control is nothing special it automatically stops playing if i start
another activity normally this would be desirable because you wouldn't play ps4
and pc games on the same tv at the same time unless you wanted the universe to
implode but the sonos is different i could actually want to play games and
have ambient music and aside from that it can't even browse my music services
or anything it just dumbly provides basic playback controls for whatever i
last set up on my pc or phone but speaking of phones that leads into
some positive stuff myharmony.com's cloud syncing means that
enabling your harmony's functionality on other devices such as an iphone or
Android phone is actually super simple
just fire up the app so i'm gonna actually do this live we're gonna do a
live demo holy crap it's amazing uh so you fire up the app and as long as
you've set it up so your devices all take input from the hub
rather than directly from the ir blaster on the remote ir blaster positioning is
key here you can actually use gestures
to here i'm just gonna i'll power watch pc off because that's the main thing i
actually do instead of you can use gestures or buttons to do all this stuff
on your phone instead so
i guess at this point then it's conclusion time question number one is
it awesome the answer yes it is i can just sit down and relax
instead of hunting for remotes and i'll never have to hear why did you spend all
this money i can't even use it because it never works
but question number two could i throw away
all of my other remotes the answer is no for this config i would still need my
sadeco air mouse and keyboard my wiimote
and my ps4 controller and finally question number three the
big one is this worth over three hundred dollars hmm
i've spent enough time juggling remotes in my life that i'm pretty good at it
and there's no way i would spend that kind of money on this for myself but
that doesn't mean that it won't be worth it for some people this product despite
its difficult setup has an amazing ease
of use once it's already configured that is just made for tech dad or tech son to
buy for their family and then set it up for them and not get phoned or woken up
in the middle of the night anymore because someone can't watch their favorite show oh yeah it does tv too but
i wasn't going to subscribe to cable just to demo that so and even though
this tech dad couldn't get it working without help i do have to give props to
their support which is open on saturday in canada they actually got me sorted
out reasonably quickly so that's pretty much it it wins the i
wouldn't buy one but i know a dozen people it would be perfect for award
speaking of things i unfortunately can't buy because they happen to be u.s only
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