Logitech Remotes: in Harmony with your TV

Our desk is littered with the remote controls of TVs past, like little ducklings that have been separated from their mothers. In future though, we won't even need to take remote controls out of their boxes -- Logitech's Harmony 675 can control up to 15 pieces of electronics at once, meaning we can rule the living room like an all-powerful Bond villain.

For us AV geeks, this could be the most useful thing since food. Attach its USB umbilical cord to your computer, and off to the Internet it heads. The Logitech Web site will ask for the name and model of every single piece of equipment you own -- TV, DVD player, even game console, and then automatically programs itself to control them.

But that's not all -- it programs a bunch of macros in there as well, so all the most common functions are available at the touch of a button. Hit the clapperboard icon, for example, and the remote control turns your TV to the right AV channel, knocks the DVD player on from standby, and then tells it to play the DVD. What happens if you've already turned the DVD player on? Well, the remote control is clever enough to spot and remember this, and will cut that part of the macro out automatically. Clever stuff going on inside means it's completely idiot-proof on the outside.

How else do you improve on that? Well, you make the remote control reasonably handsome, so that it doesn't scare animals and small children. Then you include interchangeable covers, with silver, red and blue included as standard. Finally, you make sure it's got a backlight, so you can use it in the dark of your home cinema. We're taking the Harmony 675 home for a workout and we'll let you know how it copes with a real-world, gadget-crammed living room. -GC

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• Tags:
• Logitech Inc.,
• DVD player,
• children,
• home cinema,
• console