Harmony Ultimate Hub Review

[Tom]

I recently bought a Harmony Ultimate Hub to replace my 650 remote, it's pretty nice, but I've found I really like having a physical remote, and the only two remotes that work with the hub are the one that comes with the Harmony Smart Hub, and the Harmony Touch. The Smart remote is a little dumb, only three activity buttons, and a pretty bare bones remote. Where as the touch has a touch screen LCD, and supports more devices at once than the hub does.

The hub allows you to control 8 devices from your smart phone or tablet, and the in-app programming is rather nice. You can do nearly everything in the app itself, so you don't have to mess with myharmony.com at all (it only works with myharmony, and not with the older legacy apps). I think the bits you need myharmony for is setting up more complex sequences and custom commands, and learning ir commands.

The most interesting things about the hub is it communicates with the apps over wifi, and it supports RF and Blutooth. I have it natively controlling my Wii and Roku using blutooth. It's really pretty cool. Also, it turns out the PS2 supports IR, and it supports the main control buttons on that as well (four main buttons and the dpad). It'd be a really crappy way of playing a game, but you can configure it with the remote, or play DVDs and such.

So yeah, I have it controlling every single one of my devices. Sadly I'm already up to 7 out of 8 devices that the hub supports. The last device will be the 360 when it comes in.

I'll probably get a Harmony Touch to augment the features of the hub, and give me a physical remote. The touch itself actually supports 15 devices, so that may be the better option, though I don't know if it supports RF by itself, so using just the touch would probably be less flexible. My hope is combining the touch and hub still gets you 15 devices rather than 8...

Price of the hub is a reasonable $99. Price of the Touch however is $250 brand new. Though you can find it for anywhere around $100-200 used/refurbed.

Bit much to pay, but consider the hub uses wifi. You can control your devices from anywhere in your wifi network.