universal remotes

What's New

Logitech Harmony Touch Smart Touchscreen Universal Controller

Touchscreen plus buttons for total control.
- By John Sciacca
- Posted December 25, 2012
- 1
Remote controls can essentially be clumped into three categories: low-, middle-, and high-end. At the low end are DIY models that offer basic “all-in-one” control functions and are meant to replace lost or broken manufacturer-issued remotes. High-end models require professional programming and provide powerful automation features, IP and RS-232 control, and radio-frequency operation.

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iPhone Home

Three app-based solutions for controlling your A/V system (and more).
- By Daniel Kumin
- Posted October 16, 2012
- 2
When we first looked at iPhone/iPod touch remote control solutions in our September 2010 issue, the concept was novel enough that we were unabashedly gushy. There was only a bare handful of remote control apps, and the variety of angles by which they attacked, mostly success- fully, the ever-vexing problem of how to operate an A/V system without losing any marbles (and then throwing them, hard, at expensive components) was truly cool.

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Got an App For That?

App-based control is replacing the traditional remote.
- By John Sciacca
- Posted October 16, 2012
- 1
App is a word that was barely even part of the public lexicon a few years ago, but now has become such an entrenched part of it that even my mom — quite possibly the least technologically inclined person on the planet — drops the phrase, “There’s probably an app for that.”

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Win a Peel Universal Remote

Help us out again, and get your home theater under control with a little help from Peel's pear-shaped widget
- By Michael Berk
- Posted October 21, 2011
- 58
The Peel universal remote is a combo platter including a transmitter and receiver that keeps in touch with your home network via ZigBee and passes on commands to your gear via IR, operated via a free app for

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Out-of-Sight A/V

Keep down the clutter by hiding your home theater gear away.
- By John Sciacca
- Posted September 19, 2011
Prices for flat-panel TVs have been reduced to a level where they’ve literally become throwaway commodities. Just yesterday, a customer informed me that he was going to put a TV outside on his deck and “leave it there until it breaks, then buy another one.”

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Review: The Best iPhone Universal Remote Apps

We test four iOS apps that can take control of your home theater.
- By Daniel Kumin
- Posted October 12, 2010
- 3
Like some 40 million other people, I love my iPhone. It’s always with me, serving as everything from trail-finder to stock ticker to guitar tuner to, occasionally, mobile phone. While fumbling in the dark with the minimum three or four remote controls that my ever-shifting A/V system requires just to watch a movie, I’ve often wondered if there was “an app for that.”

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