Harmony® Control 4+

Great piece of kit, let down by a poor design choice in the software. You can’t control individual devices independent of each other, meaning if my RF air con is on, and I’m watching TV, turning off my TV will turn off my air con, or turning off my air con will turn off my TV. You can manually control each device, but not using Alexa, as that only works with ‘activities’ where one ‘off’ command triggers everything to power down. If Logitech fix this, (they haven’t in years) this product will be the best consumer IR smart hun. Until then, it’s a half baked product stubbornly refusing to fufill its potential, and this app is largely to blame. Disappointed.

I will admit that setting it up was a bit harder work than I anticipated as I had to do some manual “fettling” of the sequences to get it to work as I wanted, especially timings as some devices automatically switch on others through HDMI, so getting the right devices to come on first was crucial, but nothing that a bit of experimentation didn’t cure. I am controlling an Apple HD TV, Panasonic Blu Ray, Samsung TV, venerable Yamaha DSP-A1 amp and Sky Q box all with no trouble and the entire family use the app and remote with no issues, before that would be 5 remotes and a raft of instructions from me if they wanted to watch Apple TV when they had been watching Sky. I am an electronic engineer, so maybe I am used to not needing to be guided through every step, but in my opinion, Logitech have done their best to make it as easy as they can do, bearing in mind the amount of devices it supports and all the possible scenarios users might want. No technical know-how is needed, just some logical thought, patience and the knowledge that it might take you an entire evening to get it running as you want. Remote, Hub and app fully deserve 4 stars in my opinion.

The app is about as full featured as I could want but that level of complexity comes at a price with some post initial setup options buried deep in a nest of menu pages. Once you understand the rational it makes sense but I fear some users may never discover them. Initial setup of a new hub went slowly until I understood I needed to create a new user account rather than log into my (very) old Harmony 1100 one. I was relieved to be able to import devices from that old user account later in the setup.

The setup did lead me down the garden path somewhat when it found my Apple TV on the network but eventually I discovered the “Harmony Pro” Bluetooth Apple TV 4k device which gave me more functionality. Still not a complete replacement for the Apple TV 4k remote with my NFL Gamepass app but good enough for many tvOS apps.

The app offers an easy to use virtual remote on both my iPhone and iPad, functionality I tend not to use but nice to have. Well worth the download from the app store but be prepared to spend time learning what it can do.