Logitech Harmony 1100 Touch Screen Universal Remote [Harmony 1100 Wins CES Award]

Logitech’s Harmony range of universal remotes is set to expand with the up and coming availability of Logitech’s new Harmony 1100 advanced touch screen universal remote which serves to build upon the success or the long since available Harmony 1000 universal remote and the fact that the Harmony 1100 has received the CES 2009 Design and Engineering Award: Best of Innovations will undoubtedly serve to give Logitech’s new universal remote an immediate edge over its competitors.

‘The Harmony 1100 is a natural extension of the Harmony promise – to simplify today’s complex home-entertainment systems,’ said Ashish Arora, vice president and general manager of Logitech’s Harmony business unit who introduced the new Harmony 1100. ‘As more and more people get the bulk of their entertainment at home, the Harmony 1100 will help people get more out of their home-entertainment experience – for a fraction of the price of traditional custom-installed remotes.’

The brushed black aluminium, palm sized Harmony 1100 boasts a QVGA resolution 3.5” touch screen and, apart from running newly developed Harmony software, comes with the ability to add shortcuts to the most used commands within immediate reach or to appear based on particular mode selections (Logitech’s press release stating, by way of an example, ‘If you love to watch movies, for example, and are always using the Play and Pause buttons, you can tell the Harmony 1100 to make those commands immediately available on the screen once you start your movie’).

Logitech’s press release detail the Harmony 1100’s Key Features as follows:

One Touch to Your Entertainment: The Harmony 1100 delivers the renowned benefits common to the Harmony family of universal remotes, including its exclusive one-touch activity-based control system powered by the world’s largest A/V-control database of entertainment equipment, as well as its convenient online setup process. The Harmony 1100 remote simplifies your entertainment with one-touch activity-based control. The whole family, your friends, and even the babysitter can simply select what they want to do by choosing the appropriate on-screen icon – such as “Watch TV” – and the Harmony 1100 remote does the rest. The remote will turn on the TV, the DVD player, the A/V receiver and any other necessary devices. There’s no need to control components individually – the Harmony 1100 remote manages everything.

Guided Online Setup: Logitech’s Internet-based setup makes getting the Harmony 1100 up and running as easy as possible. With its intuitive setup wizard guiding the process, the Harmony 1100 online interface allows you to enter your components’ make and model numbers. Then, this information is automatically matched to the characteristics, discrete codes and infrared commands of the more than 225,000 devices from more than 5,000 manufacturers contained in Logitech’s online database. Any devices that aren’t in the database can be quickly added. When you want to add a device to your living room, you can be confident that the Harmony 1100 remote will work with the devices you own today, and the ones you’ll buy in the future.

The Logitech Harmony 1100 Touch Screen Universal Remote is set to begin shipping in the US and Europe as of February and will set you back just shy of $500.