Gadgetory

right as soon as I open it I actually found the packaging even for the Harmony ultimate which is basically Harmony ultimate one and a harmony hub in a single package a little intimidating with all the space-age looking pieces and wires staring me down when I first opened it up my wife actually disagreed but I guess with the kinds of packages she encounters on a daily basis it takes more than some 7-inch battery-powered gizmo to get her riled up with the purchase of a qualifying Intel processor SSD or nook you could instantly win an Intel gaming Jersey and be entered in the draw for the ultimate system click now to learn more ok so now that we've all recovered from my terrible opening joke the first step to getting this baby going is to create an account for my harmony comm and download the app for your PC which lets you import settings from your hypothetical previous harmony remote I detects compatible devices on the network like so knows audio gear and nest thermostats then helps you manually add your other devices by part number by the way I'd recommend searching the database for your gear before investing in a remote to avoid some unpleasant surprises at this stage then once your devices are added it guides you through setting up activities so you choose what you want to do let's say watch PC for example then you pick out all the devices and inputs that are associated with that activity and in theory when you trigger the activity on the remote all the appropriate stuff should turn on and everything else should be off alright so obviously this isn't going to do anything here so let's go on a field trip to see how it all works in the real world alright so here we are at my house my devices are Samsung 52 inch not smart so I guess a dumb TV a Windows Media Center PC with the Microsoft dongle for IR I've also got an uncle receiver a Wii and a ps4 as well as a chromecast plugged into the back of the receiver so I added the chromecast in the ps4 just to make this video a little bit more interesting so front and center right here is the harmony hub it's an IR blaster RF receiver it's a Wi-Fi client I'm pretty sure it's got bluetooth - the objective is for it to be able to pick up an RF signal from the remote and blast the other ones mostly IR - everything that the remote wants to control now our signals will bounce around and often hit whatever they need to but if you have a door in front of your device or for whatever reason it can't hit it you can use one of the two included mini IR blasters in order to amplify the signal or reposition it I found that the hub couldn't hit my receiver normally but actually positioning a mini blaster here and here took care of it so everything is able to be hit so let's change gears for a second and have a look at the remote it's it's in a handy little charging dock and has your standard media control buttons on top navigation buttons on the bottom and then some programmable buttons on the very bottom the middle is dominated by a touchscreen that turns on when you pick up the device with an accelerometer you can use that to to do week many of the settings that otherwise you'd use the my harmony application to change and then sync to the remote it's a process it takes about 20 to 30 seconds from here you can turn off the annoying lockscreen and even more importantly use it to launch your activities and execute context appropriate commands that are a bit more complicated than play or volume up all right so enough with the let's click watch pc it turns on the TV changes the input powers up the receiver and finally wakes the computer from sleep then if i press exit once it's actually done completely waking up hmm it shuts the whole thing back down now for devices like the PlayStation 4 and chromecast they'll still rely on their own remotes so a controller or our phone to wake up but I still find configuring them with the Harmony ultimate extremely useful because it lets you make much better use of the available inputs on your setup now so let's go ahead and turn it off my receiver only has two HDMI inputs but with one button I can mix and match TV HDMI inputs and receiver audio inputs now in a way that would normally be pretty cumbersome to navigate and involve changing inputs here then changing inputs here making sure the volumes are leveled and all that kind of stuff so I'm using the PlayStation 4 that way with an HDMI input on the TV and then an optical audio in set to I think CD or something like that because he still has CDs on the receiver sure someone does and I'm very sorry ok so looks awesome right well hold on don't throw your money at the screen yet it took a lot of tinkering to get it this way first of all and I must be an idiot right when I wanted to add my PC I clicked at a PC instead of entering the part number of my IR receiver or manually searching for Microsoft media center se or something like that it took 30 minutes with tech support to figure out why my PC wasn't getting any commands but at least there's good news and that's that if you do the media center se trick you can bind your programmable buttons to commands like alt f4 or other shortcut keys so that I can use this handy little sound switching app that I have to switch between my speakers and my wireless headphones so that's kind of cool so then I set out to get the Wii working and I ran into challenge number two the default timing for TV input switching would cause it to fail so here I'm going to go ahead I'm going to switch to the Wii right now would cause it to fail to switch if I powered the whole thing off while I was on a different input and fired up a different activity and then switch to the week so I had to increase the power delay time from eight point five to twelve seconds to make this work every time not a huge deal just not amazingly user-friendly challenge number three was getting it to work with the Wii as advertised beyond just setting the right inputs at all I looked at every guide I can find and I still can't figure out how to connect to it via bluetooth so the harmony hub can actually power it on instead of me having to do it manually but truthfully I'm not even sure if I want to because I'll always need a Wii mote to use the thing anyway and apparently some games require the remote to be unbound in order to work anyway so you're going to be constantly switching that which ties into my last challenge just because something is supported doesn't mean it's not a bit janky I don't have a nest or Phillips hue lighting system so I can't comment on those but the Sonos control is nothing special it automatically stops playing if I start another activity normally this would be desirable because you wouldn't play ps4 and PC games on the same TV at the same time unless you wanted the universe to implode but the Sonos is different I could actually want to play games and have ambient music and aside from that it can't even browse my music services or anything it just Dunley provides basic playback controls for whatever I last set up on my PC or phone bit but speaking of phones that leads into some positive stuff my Harmony comms cloud syncing means that enabling your harmonies functionality on other devices such as an iPhone or Android phone is actually super simple just fire up the app so I'm going to actually do this live we're gonna do live demo will be crap it's amazing so you fire up the app and as long as you've set it up so your devices all take input from the hub rather than directly from the IR blaster on the remote IR blaster positioning is key here you can actually use gestures to hear I'm just going to I'll power watch PC off because that's the main thing I actually do instead of you can use gestures or buttons to do all of this stuff on your phone instead so I guess at this point then its conclusion time question number one is it awesome the answer yes it is I can just sit down and relax instead of hunting for remotes and I'll never have to hear why did you spend all this money I can't even use it because it never works but question number two could I throw away all of my other remotes the answer is no for this config I would still need my Sudoku air mouse and keyboard my Wii mote and my ps4 controller and finally question number three the big one is this worth over $300 hmmm I've spent enough time juggling remotes in my life that I'm pretty good at it and there's no way I would spend that kind of money on this for myself but that doesn't mean that it won't be worth it for some people this product despite its difficult setup has an amazing ease of use once it's already can figured that is just made for tech dad or tech son to buy for their family and then set it up for them and not get phoned or woken up in the middle of the night anymore because someone can't watch their favorite show oh yeah it does tv2 but I wasn't going to subscribe to cable just to demo that so and even though this tech dad couldn't get it working without help I do have to give props to their support which is open on Saturday in Canada they actually got me sorted out reasonably quickly so that's pretty much it it wins the I wouldn't buy one but I know a dozen people it would be perfect for a ward speaking of things I unfortunately can't buy because they happen to be us only today's episode sponsor is ting ting has been advertising with us for a couple of months now and we could not be happier to have them on the show their services through the Sprint network at very affordable rates due to their pay only for what you use billing model ting provides you with the individual customer service like you actually pick up a phone and talk to someone like in person that only a small carrier can provide while providing the cell coverage on a large one so if you're sick of paying way too much for your wireless bill head over to Linus ENCOM and try out their savings calculator they say that 99% of people would 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