I had been told that the remote might not work on the first go around and that it might take some patience to get it going. I’m glad people warned me of that because the whole process felt a lot smoother than it otherwise might have. (Expect the worst and something easy will seem like grade school addition.) There was only one minor bump in the whole thing, and it was minor. We’ll get to that in a moment.

At the start, Harmony supplies a little worksheet for you to write down the brand and model numbers of all the equipment you want to program in. For me, that’s the TV, the cable box/DVR, the TiVo, the upscaling DVD player, and the Wii. Pulling the model numbers off of those was easy enough. (Brand: Nintendo. Model: Wii) I plugged the remote into the USB port with the cable that came with it, and installed the program that came with it to program the sucker. It downloaded a few updates, asked to reboot the machine, and then went straight to work. The installation program is a Flash interface thing. You need to get used to pressing buttons that don’t “feel” any different when they’re pressed, to the point where you have no clue if it worked or not. (Contrast that to the clicking sound you get when you push a button in a website, or the way the button changes colors or loses its drop shadow to indicate it was depressed for a second.) It’s a minor thing, but it did lead me to click “Next” a couple times too many along the way.

Navigating through a series of Drop Down and Text boxes was easy enough. Click on the TV icon, drop down to Sony, key in the model number, and click submit. The TV gave me one problem in that there were three possible choices that were variants on the same TV. I chose the first one, and it’s what I’m using to this day. It does everything that needs doing on this TV.

Repeat for cable box, DVR, etc. The Nintendo Wii prompts a reminder that the remote control can’t be used as a Wiimote, since it’s not a Bluetooth device. It does, however, turn on the TV and set the TV’s input to the proper selection.

You will need to know which device is plugged into which input on the back of the TV. I copied that down from the menu screen of the TV, so it wasn’t a problem.

After that, you’re asked to create “Actions,” which is the nice way of saying what keypresses will cause what things to turn on/off. One at a time, I set each up to turn on along with the TV, and let the TV look for that thing’s input. In other words, turn on the DVD player and the TV, and look for the DVD wire inputted into the TV. (You even have the option of ejecting the disc tray on power up, if you wish.) Simple. If I switch to the DVR button, the DVD will be shut down and the DVR will be powered on with the TV pointing there, too.

Then, the remote urges you to try those actions to check that everything powers on and is tuned to the right thing. If so, click on the OK option button next to that part of the screen. Click click click. Work work work.

In one case — I think it was the TiVO — the unit didn’t turn on. The remote asked me some simple yes/no questions and adjusted itself perfectly. (”Is the TiVo on?” No. “Is it on now?” Yes. “OK, all set.”)

From start to finish, it probably took me all of a half hour. If I had to do it again, I could probably halve the time. I could have gone back in and tried the other TV settings, but why try to fix what already works?

I set up the feature in the Settings menu to turn the remote on automatically when I pick it up. It has a tilt sensor doohicky inside so that it can sense when it’s being picked up. The backlight and screen turn on to make it easier to choose an action. Very handy.

Also, you can add wallpaper and change the background image on the screen. I haven’t done either yet, but I’m looking forward to adding family pictures to the slideshow. Then, as the remote is charging, it’ll cycle through some pics of the nieces and nephew. I think my wife will like that feature. Heh heh

NEXT WEEK: General Usage. I want a few days to spend with this before I review it. So far, though, so good. Everything’s working.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 8:45 am and is filed under TV, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.