Harmony for box 360

I picked up the Harmony Remote for the box 360 yesterday- this is a replacement for the Harmony 659 I purchased a few months ago. Both are similar, so why am I upgrading? The button placement and weight of the Harmony 360 remote are MUCH better- and I am planning to (eventually) get an xBox 360!

There is also a new Harmony 550 remote I saw at BestBuy that looks much like the Harmony 360, save for a few differences:

• Black body instead of white
• Blue backlight instead of greeen
• A few more buttons in place of hte X, Y, A, B buttons
• Ability to control 15 devices instead of 12
• $30 more for the 550

I doubt I will ever need more than 12 devices (I currently have 8, including my xBox and PS2) and I prefer the green backlight to the blue, so I went with the 360.

So far... The remote is MUCH more comfortable to use! There are more physical buttons (54 vs. 51) but there are two less 'soft-key' buttons (4 vs. 6)- however the few addional buttons are much welcomed items for Windows Media Center and other PVRs- such as skip forward and skip back- and a back key as well. The four xBox keys are cutomizable (X, Y, A, B) and can be used for other DVR featurs as well (like Live TV, Channel Guide, etc).

The harmony remotes can be as easy or as complicated to setup as you desire; The xBox 360 remote comes with a v5.1 of the setup software that has a localy run GUI overlay to walk you through the setup on the members.harmonyremote.com website- i.e. you enter the information in a local 'wizard' program and it is transferred to the Harmony Remote site for programming/downloads.

It has taken me about 4 hours to tweak the remote and I have it almost exactly where I want it- but there do seem to be some caveats with the remote; for example, the TV power setting works fine on my 'Comcast PVR' setting, not on my 'Media Center PVR' setting- even though it is using the same IR command from the Logitech libriary. I need up having to use the learning feature of the remote to replace the IR command for that one particular option.

Other reviews:

Techage review of the Harmony for the xBox 360
Krunker's review of the Harmony for the xBox 360

In other news, for anyone looking for a good deal on a used Marmong remote, my old Logitech Harmony 659 will be on eBay shortly! :o)