Logitech has done really well with their acquisition of Intrigue Technologies, makers of the Harmony remote control line. With the broadened marketing and distribution muscle behind it, Logitech announced that they have overtaken Philips and Sony as market share leaders for programmable remote controls. This doesn’t surprise me, as most remote controls have a serious drawback – you have to program them. The Harmony essentially programs itself once you walk through a questionnaire online. While it took them a year or so before they had enough codes online to work consistently, I now consider the Harmony the reviewer’s best friend: add a new piece of gear in the rack; add a new piece of gear online to the remote. Done. And, because it’s task-oriented (“watch TV,” “watch DVD”), it’s spouse and babysitter friendly.
I’d heard rumors that a color Harmony was on the way, but they didn’t make much sense – the Harmony just uses its small monochrome LCD for simple status and help messages. Logitech unveiled the Harmony 880 at CES in Las Vegas this past week, and it has a color screen along with a strong rationale for the addition. The new screen is about twice the size of the traditional screen, is not terribly high resolution and is not a touch screen. The notion is that a larger color screen allows the Harmony to display more information and provide after-macro customization options (buttons flank the screen on both sides). Task-oriented remotes are great, but they can’t always deal with complex options. For example, if you have a widescreen TV, once you’ve “watched a DVD,” you may need to adjust the aspect ratio. Or not – depending on the movie. In my home theater, we added a “slowly dim the lights” command every time you pressed “play.” Unfortunately, that meant that any time you paused the movie, it was pitch black in the room, and the lighting controls were buried in a separate menu. With the new 880, you’ll be able to place those commands on the color screen after the main activity has launched. Colorful TV station logos for a favorites menu (part of the canned demo on the prototype units shown at the show) are merely a bonus.
The price point on the unit will be an astonishingly low $249, which is less than the original monochrome unit retailed for when it launched three years ago.
-avi
Sounds like a very nice product.
Posted by: Wandas11 | February 20, 2008 at 12:22 PM