Now that I've brought the XBox 360 front and center as the DVD player as well as the gateway for our pictures, music and videos, I needed to really get the remote control story in order.
I tried to give the old Harman Kardon Take Control a go but since I had no IR remote for the Xbox I was stuck.
I wanted something that drove the Xbox out of the box but also could learn other remotes, so I bypassed the Microsoft XBox remote as too limited.
The Harmony XBox remote looked it might do the trick (I also bypassed this one, just didn't seem to give me confidence - anthrox.com?).
Looks like Paul Thurott has a good write up on this subject as well, although I disagree with his conclusions.
The Harmony looks and feels good. It's thin for about two-thirds of the remote with a the batteries at the bottom. It has a good backlight as well. One negative are the channel and volume buttons - they don't have enough travel as I'd like. It looks sturdy enough although we have carpeting down here so I don't expect many hazards.
I had problems setting it up. The main issue was that I didn't get the right model number for my Samsung TV. It had a crazy long model number and I goofed on one letter. This caused the remote to misunderstand how to switch from HDMI to Comnponent2 and such and I spent way too much time figuring out what was wrong. You would figure that Samsung would have some standardization on switching inputs on their TVs - oh well.
Other than that, the software itself has too many wizards. You can't just go in and do something - you have answer the same set of inane questions until you get the screen you want.
I understand Logitech's desire to make it way easy for people who are not into technology to set this up but let's face it - how many luddites will buy an XBox compatible learning remote control that is programmed via PC? Not many, nor perhaps even one. I suggest some sort of advanced panel to cut to the chase.
I did finally get it all set up right before our New Year's part and was able to wing through a nice slideshow and DVD navigation on the XBox with aplomb. We had a friend over who was a Nintendo employee and I think even he was impressed.
Net net - if you're using your Xbox for more than games, invest. I bought mine on eBay for about $85.
I had some issues getting my Harmony remote for the 360 setup as well but a gut over in the Harmony forums was able to point me in the right direction. Now I love this thing. Once you go through the initial setup wizard you can go in and manually adjust things. At first I was annoyed with the wizards because they make you update the remote after each step, but once I would that I could manually change things it went a lot faster.
Posted by: Jigsaw hc | February 10, 2007 at 11:48 PM