Logitech Harmony 880
Cnet has a nice review of the Logitech Harmony 880 programmable universal remote. You know, I have always wanted one of these and do away with the mess that is the coffee table at home, as it is covered in remotes. I have tried the cheap ones and they are just a waste of money.
If you are looking for a universal remote then check out this one.
Cnet writes:
Though slightly larger than its predecessors, the 880 retains a similar dumbbell shape, measuring 8.1 inches long by 2.3 inches wide by 1.3 inches deep and weighing 5.8 ounces. However, a couple of significant differences separate it from previous models. In addition to the screen’s color capabilities (previous models were limited to black-and-white), the LCD is larger. The increased screen real estate offers room for a total of eight contextual icons, corresponding to adjacent hard buttons. That’s up from six on previous Harmony models.
The 128×160-pixel color display is pretty low resolution (read: early Palm color screen), but it’s a big improvement over the monochrome screens found on such models as the Harmony 688 and 676. One thing we didn’t love was that the activity-based icons could have been a little cleaner-looking and easier to read; hopefully Logitech will tweak them in due time.
Previous Harmony remotes featured soft, rubbery buttons that sometimes weren’t as responsive as we would have liked. For this model, Logitech has gone with all hard plastic buttons–generally a good thing, though buttons such as the video-transport buttons (record, play, rewind, fast-forward, pause, and stop) and the 12-digit keypad are still spaced very close to each other, so it’s hard to operate by feel alone. However, it is worth noting that context-specific side keys–volume and channel up/down–are raised nicely in just the right places. All in all, we felt the button layout was pretty well thought out; it shouldn’t cause too many irritations and seems friendly enough toward digital set-top boxes, DVRs, and even Media Center PCs, though you will have to map/customize certain buttons manually to perform certain tasks.
As noted, the 880 includes a docking station for juicing up the included rechargeable batteries; you simply lie the remote down in its cradle. Not only is it nice to have a recharging option to save dough on batteries, but if you’re good about leaving the remote in its cradle, you’ll always know where it is when you need it. The other nice feature that the 880 offers is its motion sensor: when you pick up the remote, it automatically turns on. You can also easily add your own digital images as backgrounds and screensavers–there’s a slide-show feature–though we found that we had to crop our images into vertical shots or they’d appear hideously stretched on the screen. And it really wasn’t a good idea to have a picture as a background because it made the icons difficult to read; stick with the default blue background.
Read the full review here