Hi - I'm interested in a review of the harmony 1100, specifically with pros and cons to the harmoney 900 would be nice.
In my limited experience, I thought the 900 (wand) would be ideal, but surprisingly, my wife wants to go with the 1100 (all touchscreen). I had thought she'd like the more traditional wand style, but you guys might be interested to learn hat she believes that in the age of iphones, itouches, etc... that using "soft buttons" are more natural now that a hard button.
My concerns is that the 1100 seems older tech - older RF scheme, differerent method to update the RF blaster, etc. Will the 1100 be able to dimm lights, move shades, more easily in future?
In choosing the 1100, is it really about form factor, or is it something already outdated by the 900?
Thank you kindly!
Scott
The 1100 isn't quite "all touchscreen", but it's pretty close. Most people still like some hard buttons and before the 1000 came out, I was taking with Harmony about changing some of their designs because the original models with the jog wheel were hard for some to use without scrolling the wheel while they pressed it. I wanted them to come out with something that could be used by people with no/limited use of one hand, could set on their leg or the arm of a chair/sofa and had what the 1000 has with the addition of the keypad as hard buttons. The person I talked with said that they already had something similar, without the keypad and it turned into the bane of my existence because of the software problems. Once they fixed those, it was a great remote. The OS was definitely not tested enough when they took it to market, though.
The 900 and 1100 are a new OS and can't be updated to use the existing setup from an older model. They aren't telling many people about this but I had a fairly long conversation last Thursday with one of their Tier 2 tech support people and this is why I'm balking at getting an 1100 as a replacement for a customer's 1000. The 1100 is in the same form as the 1000 but the four buttons along the left and right sides, which used to be used only for Cable/DVR commands can now be mapped for any device.
No, light control isn't part of the 1100 and the Pro series are gone, too. It looks like Z-Wave is dying fast- URC has gone to Zigby, Harmony screwed the pooch with the 1000 by not keeping the promise of lighting control and then took it away completely in August of '07.
If you want to dim lights, open/close shades and all of those things, you'll be better off with a URC and their RF base station. The MX-5000 and MX-6000 have two-way communication and Wi-Fi, using their PS-X2. The shades will need some kind of controller and of they only need contact closure, the URC MSC-400 will allow that. It also does IR or RS-232 commands and receives RF or IR and has a way to know the state of the device it's trying to control. They're coming out with a new model called the MX-4000 but it's not out yet and the price hasn't even been determined.
As far as a different method of updating the RF extender, it's not a big deal unless the extender is in one place and the computer is somewhere else. With a laptop, it's not an issue.
AS long as the OS issues have been taken care of, the 1100 should be really good and it can be set up to do things they usually tell people it won't do.
