Do you know this situation? You just made yourself comfortable on the couch while watching TV, realise it’s crap, want to switch to the Blu-Ray movie you wisely already put into your player a while ago and then have to juggle multiple remote controls to do this? You wish you’d be Luke Skywalker to force pull the missing Blu-Ray player remote from the table nearby and then have six arms like Dr. Octopus to perform the following sequence of actions:

Grab cable tv box remote, turn off cable tv box, exchange cable tv remote with tv remote, change input from AV1 to HDMI1, exchange tv remote with Blu-Ray player remote, start Blu-Ray player, exchange Blu-Ray player remote with surround system remote, Turn on surround system and choose correct input, put away remote control.

It does not sound too bad yet but then every time you want to adjust the volume, brightness or pause the movie, you need to look for the right remote first and ideally place them near you. I got into this towards the end of last year when I added a surround system and an Apple TV to my existing lounge setup (TV, cable box and Playstation 3) making it a total of 5 remote controls on the couch.

Call me lazy (I prefer ‘efficient’) but it annoyed me pretty soon. After a bit of research I decided to buy an All-in-one remote control and went for the Logitech Harmony One. To make it short, I love it and it cleaned up the mess – after spending some time configuring it.

What I did not expect is how well it actually works. I thought that there would be some sort of button on those All-in-one remotes which lets you change between the different remotes but thanks to a clever (but time intense) configuration process it knows that when I watch a movie via AppleTV that the arrow keys need to control that device while the volume buttons control the surround system. Plus it automatically switches the TV to the right input when I chose an ‘action’.

‘Actions’ have to be defined on the Harmony One via a setup application on a PC or Mac. Actions can be ‘Watch TV’ or ‘Play games’. The touch screen display on top of the remote shows them as buttons and once clicked, a sequence like the one mentioned above is being played through. No need to turn on, turn off or switch the channel of any device. The remote knows what it has to do. It seems to work best with TVs that have a specific button for each input (e.g. HDMI1) and not cycle through like mine. While it was possible to configure the remote so that it knows how often it needs to ‘press’ the ‘next input’ button, it fails when I switch back from using the PS3 to watching TV. Not a big deal though since I placed the ‘next input’ button on the touchscreen and just press it once. It still turns off the PS3 and surround system and turns on the cable box. Strangely it works when switching back from AppleTV to cable so maybe I just need to set it up once more.

Regarding the PS3:

As the Harmony One works with IR and the PS3 remote control (or controllers) work with Bluetooth a separate adapter is needed. It was worth buying though. It does not even use a USB slot as it simply connects via Bluetooth to the PS3 and transforms the IR signals into something the PS3 can understand.

So should you buy the Logitech Harmony One? I paid £99 for it which is not cheap but as I’ve said, I am glad I spent the money. For you, it depends on the number of remote controls in your living room and how often you switch actions on a normal evening. If you have 3 or more remote controls and switch more than 2 or 3 times each evening than you should start thinking about it. More than 4 remotes? Buy it now!