For over a year I’ve been using a Harmony 688 universal remote and been rather happy with it. Well, now technically it’s a Logitech Harmony 688 universal remote, since they bought out Harmony a while ago. It’s been a great remote. Nearly perfect, in fact.

So why have I recently tossed the 688 into a drawer, in exchange for another remote? Frankly, nearly perfect means that there’s a little bit of room for improvement. Besides… Logitech has released new products to the Harmony line!

Mind you, I’ve got very few complaints with the 688. I’ve added a bunch of devices to the “media wall” – i.e. a Sirius receiver – and removed a few others – i.e. a PS2 – but it’s been easy to keep up to keep the remote up to date. The PC based configuration application makes it a piece of cake. I’ve been a little limited by the four activity buttons (I could use more) and the three line display (again, I could use more)… and it eats batteries rather quickly. Takes about two months to drain’m. At some point the batteries will be low enough to stop turning on the cable box but it will still turn on the TV and Receiver – dunno why that happens but if you pop in fresh batteries it all works fine.

Over the last year Logitech has released a few different remotes, one of which was designed for the Xbox 360. I took a look at that one but frankly it did nothing for me. I don’t have a Media Center PC, so the Media Center button means nothing to me. The A/B/X/Y buttons would have been nice but it wasn’t a big deal either… besides, all five buttons are available on the 688 via the soft-keys display. The real thing that removed it from consideration was the display itself: it was nicer looking than the 688 but it had two lines: far too limiting for my needs.

Then the 880 entered my awareness. I had seen it all over the ‘net and heard some good stuff about it, but said “ahhh” because I already had the 688. And, well, it’s pricy. No doubt about that. In fact, that’s the single biggest drawback to it. But somewhere along the line I got handed one at a discount, so I thought I’d take a shot with it.

Whoa.

It’s the exact same size as the 688, which is good, since the 688 had a good size. The buttons on the 880 are laid out much better than the 688 were: it looks like they did a good deal of usability testing on later generations. While the 688 buttons were aesthetically pleasing, it wasn’t very great for usability… you never really knew were your thumb was on it, since it was an oval… required a lot of looking, especially in the beginning. I think the 880 button layout is much better.

It’s got a color screen. A color screen that offers four lines instead of three, meaning that there’s eight soft-key buttons this go around. w00t! There’s no dedicated activity buttons on the 880, though: you hit the Activities button and the display shows the available Activities. So with one key press (or if there’s nothing currently on, it jumps to this screen automatically) you get eight available activities. Also new to the 880 is the “Forward/Back” buttons for paging through devices and activities – the 688 just had “Next” which was limiting

Does the color screen use more power? Sure. So does the uber-bright blue backlight, but the battery on the 880 is rechargeable. Even comes with a docking station that glows with a blue ring: you’ll always know whether or not the remote is on the cradle and it looks rather, well, Geeky! Speaking of backlighting, there’s another feature associated with that too. There’s now a tilt-aware sensor in the thing. If you pick up the remote and tilt it, say to read it, the backlighting kicks in: you don’t have to press a button to activate it!

Configuration? This was the best part of the process. I upgraded the Logitech software a couple of months ago to 4.4; that’s what shipped with the 880. So I had already been using the software with the 688 and had all of my components configured. Plugged the 880 into the same computer. It popped up the Logitech software, so I logged it… it told me I had a 688 remote. Said “Hmm” and noticed a “Confirm Hardware” menu item. Clicked that and not only did it recognize that I had plugged in an 880 but it took all of my configuration settings and downloaded those to the new remote. I had to tweak a couple of things, of course: my cable box settings lost page up/down and I decided to re-order the activities items… I also forgot to pull the PS2 settings out of it, so I did that too. Looking at a few other new options and it seems that there’s a theme setting available for the display and you can turn off the tilt-awareness. It is also aware of the current date/time, which syncs automatically via the USB cable.

So, yeah, the 880 has actually one-upped the 688. They both work the same way: you have activities that control one or more devices, the remote knows what’s been turned on or off, etc. – read the original 688 review to see how both work. The thing that’s nice is that the 880 expands on the 688’s feature list, without going overboard, and made the upgrade process rather easy. Oh, that and it looks like the 880 can handle up to 255 devices. *smirk*

I can’t recommend either device enough: good stuff.