Well, most of the Harmony remotes now have a touch screen for advanced functions. Remember these are consumer devices, not advanced devices. Most of the buttons pressed are going to be for things like volume, channel, navigation (up, down, left, right), ok, pause, play, fast-forward… these are the functions you are going to rely on muscle memory for and for those, I would prefer physical buttons. The functions like switching devices or perhaps surround mode, I don’t mind looking down at the screen for because I am not constantly using them.
I have a surround receiver, and I rarely use the advanced functions for it. It is possible I am in the minority, though.
The one nice thing about this remote, I will say, is the guide on the remote itself, so you can browse shows without taking up television viewing real estate.
I agree that I’d prefer buttons over touch screen, but to me the problem to be solved (if it hasn’t been already) is the “multiple device state problem” - to watch a movie is a sequence of commands to different devices (turn on the DVD player, turn on the TV, change the TV input to the DVD player, press play, etcetera), and which depend upon knowing the state of the devices. HDMI-CEC helps somewhat by allowing two-way communication between devices (so the DVD player can signal the TV), but has the problem of knowing the on/off state of the devices now been solved? For example, if you send the ‘Power’ toggle to the DVD player, it turns off if it was on, which is not what you want. You want to send ‘Turn On’ and have it turn on if it’s off and stay on if it’s on, and similar for ‘Off’. Do some devices have ‘on’ and ‘off’ signals like thatwhich aren’t available on the remote but are disclosed to manufacturers of remotes?
The second problem I’d like to see solved is for broadcasters, cable providers, and streamers to use the ATSC content identifiers before each piece of content, so that DVRs and other devices can select signals using the content identifiers rather than using start/stop time.
Getting this stuff to work with every TV channel and video source is hard, so hard, that you will still have trouble with egde cases.
Also a TV remote with a screen forces you to take your eyes off the TV screen to operate it. Fast forwarding, pausing, commercial skipping will be a lot harder compared to a real button remote.
Looks to me like a waste of money and time.
However, that’s only my opinion and I would not buy a “Harmony” or competings products either and prefer my basket of 10 remotes next to my couch.
I know, right? All those blowhards are telling me, is that they’re unaware that pretty much every telly made in the last 10-15 years can easily be used as a computer monitor (with exceptional bang for buck).
Sure, commercial telly on the whole continues to blow ever more chunks, but many of the actual shows themselves are way better than anything that’s come before. So, I’m like, what, you watch the stuff you torrent on a poxy laptop screen or something?
If you want to impress me, tell me that you don’t use your TV aerial. And for mad bonus points, that you vandalise your neighbours’ aerials and leave ‘how to torrent shit’ guides in their mailboxes.
Yes, many devices have discrete on and off codes. A good universal remote will not only use these codes where possible but will also remember the state of your devices based on usage. If you don’t remember to use your universal remote for everything it’s on you to return your setup to the off state before trying to use it again.
The big sell for me is to be convinced that it actually talks with all of my components fully. My past experience has shown that sometimes I can’t connect a device, or that I turn off 2/3 of my TV (sometimes the cable box, sometimes the external stereo, sometimes the monitor). I spent two days once talking with Verizon about why my computer’s web page won’t change the channel - before giving up.
The worst case scenario is when the remote has to be taught to navigate a menu. It’s great when the remote has discrete buttons for “TV” and “HDMI-2”. However, when changing from television to the second hdmi input requires that “Input”, “left arrow”, left arrow". left arrow" and “enter” buttons be pressed, many things can go wrong. The assumed starting state may be wrong. The remote could be aimed improperly, so that one or more of the commands is missed by the IR receiver. A fundamentally broken model, but one that has entrenched itself.
One of the most infuriating things with the Harmony Elite is that it attempts to be clever and remember the state of my devices, so if I happen to wander into the room at night and turn off a couple of things that got left on, when someone uses the remote a day or two later things behave unexpectedly until one goes through a set of commands that makes the device’s model of the state match the real world.
I think remembering the state for a short time IS a nice feature when there’s actually a usability benefit in doing so (such as having to avoid power-up waits, etc), but after some reasonable point of inactivity it should drop back to ‘assume nothing’ mode, and any time it’s just as easy to force the state as it is to skip a step, it should perform the action rather than unpredictably (to humans) skipping it.
I didn’t realize IR “blasters” were uncommon. I have a Samsung phone that has one, but apparently not a whole lot of companies include them. Seems to be mostly companies that also make TVs. I would use the remote on my phone more often if I didn’t watch tv (hulu, netflix etc.) via my xbox.
Wozniak developed a remote control The “CORE” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL_9
That one got me through the 90’s. It had fully functional buttons and worked with anything.
The drawback was that you basically had to learn a version of assembly language to program the darn thing.
well, this is a double-edged sword… if you don’t have this option, and have components without a distinct on and off signal, you run into the same issue… back when I had a cable box, it only had “power” not “on” and “off” and if the box were on for some reason, my “watch tv” macro didn’t worry correctly.
this “remembering the state” should only be used for components without distinct on and off.
This is pretty much the entire point of Harmony remotes. They know what input your TV is on, for example, so when you say “switch to the Roku” they know how many times to hit the INPUT SELECT button. If they get out of sync there is a way to bring them back in sync, but assuming you only use the Harmony, this almost never happens. The Harmony lets you set up Activities which have the components in a particular state, and when you start the Activity, it issues the necessary remote commands to put your components in that state.
I am sure this new product does exactly the same, as it is a solved problem.
$250 for a TV remote? That’s “remote” from any real world reality. Titling this “the
smartest remote on earth” is evidence the minds behind BoingBoing have become
copywriters rather than truthsayers and coolhunters. $250 for a remote! BoingBoing
will be offering this for $39.95 in a few months. Betcha.
