Bought Harmony 700 Yesterday

You aren't the first to have a quality problem with a Harmony remote. Go through with your plans to exchange it.

I recently got a 700 along with the PS3 adapter. I really needed to replace 7 remotes but just left out my less used karaoke player. I have and will keep a Harmony 610 for the activity "Sing Karaoke". It controls everything except the game consoles.

As for the 700 and the 610, there is no way to re-order devices or activities. You're correct, they are arbitrarily chosen. I believe I've read somewhere that the touchscreen models allow re-ordering.

So far, I like the 700. I wish the very top buttons had back light but I'm learning their locations in the dark. It's IR beam seems narrower than the 610 requiring more accurate pointing at devices. Also, I like the 610's 6 'advanced' buttons instead of the 700's 4 but I've adapted to it well enough.

I've attached my current activities. With devices like the Wii and my karaoke player, I've set up activities that switch all inputs to them but I have to manually turn them on and operate them of course.

P.S. As for creating a device from scratch, just get the best one and then learn over as many of the keys already listed with or without "database" at the end of each. Then only create new ones as needed.

 

Logitech Harmony 700 Activities.pdf 210.6142578125k . file

Well done. I wish there was an easy way to document harmony configs like you've done.

FWIW, the 500 series harmony has a Re-order button at the top of the activities page next to add and remove. But my devices can't be re-ordered. It baffles me why logitech insists on arbitrarily removing perfectly good features (activity order on the 700 and sequences on the 900/1100 to name a few). It doesn't make any sense from a technical or even a marketing stand point.

Can you really put icon pictures in the additional button display as show in the picture for 700 ?

I found it because someone else in the 700 thread told me. Go check it out! I totally missed it.

Link

Thanks to black_macleod.

I bought this remote a few days ago. I absolutely hate it. My receiver is not included in it's list of known components. This tosses the Harmony on its ear. It became extremely cumbersome and struggled to scroll through inputs on both my television and my receiver, as a result. I kept going back in and tweaking it, but in the end I decided that I am taking it back, because it never did get it right.

URC R50 here I come!

What receiver do you have ?
With the harmony remote activity setup you are not supposed to go through manual inputs selection.

I have the Marantz SR 5004.

My receiver (Sony STR-DG920) was listed but I still had to learn 34 total commands from my original remote. Two were Menu and Display which both had entries from Harmony's database but didn't seem to work. I learned over them.
The other 32 commands I had the remote to learn were not included in the download from Logitech. One was for the XM input on the receiver. Also, I had to learn all of the XM controls like category up/down, tuning up/down, direct tuning, etc. For the DMPORT, there was an input command already but no transport controls like play, pause, skip forward/backward, menu, return, etc. Furthermore, the original remote has a shift key for use with the number keys. I had to learn all of the shift numbers (shift 0, shift 1, shift 2, etc.) to get direct tuning entry for AM/FM and XM to work. Clearly whoever submitted/obtained the commands for this receiver didn't do a complete job.
Having said all of that though, once I got all the commands learned and placed where I wanted them and all of the activities associated with them complete, I can now control things like "Listen to XM", "Listen to iPod" and "Listen to FM" better than my receiver's original remote or even the JP1'ed remotes I used before.