Logitech Harmony 785 Advanced Universal Remote Control

I previously owned the Harmony 525 all-in-one remote, which I thought was superb. The good thing about it compared to others is it remembers what devices are already switched on/turned off. ie If you are already watching Sky and have the tv, receiver, and Sky box switched on, then you select to watch a dvd, it will turn Sky off, and leave the tv and receiver on, and select the right inputs on them too. Then when you press the stand-by button, it remembers that Sky is already off, so it just switches off the tv, receiver, and dvd player! Excellent. The only downsides with the previous remote was the mono screen, the colour buttons (for Sky) located to far to the bottom of the remote, and the need for AAA batteries. NOW, I bought the 785 from Play (arrived by Parcelforce) and am even more impressed. Not only has it got a lovely crisp colour screen, the colour buttons are moved more to the centre, and it also has a rechargeable dock! And (and this is the biggy for anyone who has owned a previous model like myself) it uses the same software, so when you load your Harmony software on your computer, there is an option to change to another remote. All I did was click that and it asked to connect my new remote. Guess what- it put all of my device settings and activity settings on my new remote for me and I didn't have to do a thing other than disconnect and use it!!! Absolutely amazing- Well done Logitech! The build is top quality- it feels great! The software is easy to use to set up your remotes devices and activities. It even works on Apple Macs as well as Windows! What more is there to say? If you have the cash- GET IT.

It only took ~15 minutes to get a basic setup working and looks to replace 8 remotes. A little more experimentation was required to improve usability (for some reason, the backup command on a sky remote was not mapped to a physical button in the Watch TV activity). I've added a sequence to the "menu" button so that the Sky Planner is displayed (rather than two keypresses) and even got it to control my lights (on IR Dimmers).

The only issue I can find so far is that activities assume we don't multitask (e.g. pause a DVD to set something recording on the TV) as "Watch TV" would turn the DVD off. It is possible to control each device indivually if required, so it's not that big a deal... just that it seems clunky in comparison to the activities. This is where the fifth star is lost.

I was tempted by the Harmony One but the 785 is half the price (on Play), has physical colour buttons, and I am not keen on touch screens (hard to find in the dark).

I bought one of these for a friend and set it up last night. Very sleek and great design. Works as it should do and all the codes for his 7 devices were in the database. Very impressive. I set it up and the devices worked. I was able to st up "Watch a DVD" and Watch TV macros and the 785 did these very easily. One glitch was overcome , but the navigation round the database website got stuck twice. Very impressive piece of kit.