Harmony One is getting great reviews. But my experience of this remote so far, and of the 1000 I bought a year ago, is this:
You can put hours of work into customizations. Then, you make a small tweak - say, add a button to an activity - or Harmony makes a software update - and POOF! your finely honed work turns into a big pile of poo because some activity or device no longer works.
My experience of Harmony's customer service is "gee, we apologize...it looks like your activity / device got corrupted...try programming it again" - which you have to do FROM SCRATCH. (Add the device or activity, remove all of their defaults, put in your own).
Wait, let's see...the remote isn't doing what I've customized it to do, so you want me to repeat all that work in the hope that this time it will work the way it was supposed to the first time? Like, this time it will be "benevolent" instead of "corrupt"?
My current example of this fun is that I have a Listen to Music activity where the device (a Squeezebox) isn't "punching through" at all. Meaning none of the device buttons in the activity work (in fact the soft buttons don't even show up). Meaning, the remote doesn't do what is clearly on screen in the software.
Forget about how kludgy the software is - I'm talking about STABILITY. Basic quality control. How does my programming "get corrupted"? I'll tell you how - your software is complete crap!
The only way I can understand that these remotes are so popular is that most people just take the default Harmony Activity and Device programming, and don't tweak, and for them, it works. For anyone who tweaks - even if it's something as simple as moving the "Subtitle" button from Page 2 to Page 1 of your Watch a DVD activity - you just never know when a rock is going to fall from the sky onto your remote.
