Anyone with one or more electronic boxes in, around, or under their television has come to know the humble, neglected, and often lost companion we call the "remote".

Whether you have a DVD player, a Freeview Box or a good old fashioned VCR chances are it came with a remote which you added to the neat little pile on your coffee table, used once, and promptly lost in a place that half an hour of frantic searching revealed to be the sofa. I'm not sure how many of you will agree with me, but I think remotes are the most contradictory gadget ever devised. On the one hand they are useful in saving us the bother of getting up and pushing buttons on the front of our devices, but on the other hand they eat batteries, constantly get lost, and often get confused with each other.

Of course, companies have identified and capitalised on "remote chaos" for years now, offering a plethora of replacement universal remotes, some of which are more complicated than the remotes they intend to replace. Intrigue Technologies makes a line of universal remotes dubbed the Harmony, a line which is being maintained by Logitech who recently purchased the company bringing their expertise and established brand name into the mix. Gracing our desks today is the Logitech Harmony 885 Universal Remote, the current culmination of Intrique and Logitech's joint expertise.

The Logitech Harmony 885 Universal Remote is not just another run of the mill universal remote, but rather something that places itself between the universal remotes of today and the PDA-Like super-remotes used in complex, professional home cinema systems. It comes with a generously large colour LCD display, more buttons than you could shake a pointy stick at, rechargeable batteries, a charging dock, and a USB cable to hook it up to your PC/Mac for programming.

The remote includes standard buttons for many devices including DVD/VCR players, TVs and even the coloured buttons for Digiboxes. The screen has 4 buttons on each side which correspond to icons on the screen itself, it could have been touch screen but in this case it would have just been a gimmick. A couple of extra buttons are reserved for features of the remote.

A handy tutorial displays on the Harmony 885 screen until it is set up which guides you through the basic functions of the remote before you rush ahead and tailor it to your system. So, what are we waiting for:

Setting up - I decided to set up the Harmony 885 on a Mac to check if their OSX compatibility was up to scratch. Fortunately the software works at a close approximation to flawlessly with only a single minor issue. When setting up, the software targets a download directory from which it automatically runs special Harmony Remote packages that are downloaded from the set up mini-site. I could not get the remote software to automatically run the packages, meaning I had to click on them manually.

The bulk of the Harmony Remote software is, curiously, web-based- this is something I found irritating because no mini-site set up system can match that of a carefully coded and polished desktop application. Putting the set up process online, however, is a choice I think was forced by the huge database of compatible products which has to be maintained and used in the setup process. I would still have preferred a desktop application with the most recent version of the database bundled, along with the ability to download database updates.

The web based set-up requires that you first register, the registration process is quick and painless so I was soon into the meat of the set-up where I was given the option to specify which devices I wanted the Harmony 885 Remote to control. Specifying the devices is a simple process of selecting their type, proceeding, and then entering the serial number from each product. The Playstation 2 and NTL Pace box both set up flawlessly but I had trouble finding a definition that exactly matched my television, perhaps because I still don't believe in all this modern widescreen rubbish and, thus, had a fairly uncommon television for the buying demographic of the Harmony 885.

The next step required I answer a few basic questions about my AV set-up, this consisted of questions like how I turn my television on/off. This step followed through to programming the remote with the original TV remote using an IR port on the back placed specifically for learning. It has to be noted that the Hitachi TVs I use have a fairly long warm-up time and can only be turned on with an obscure ritualistic changing of "grumble-mumble" whilst pressing a channel to wake it up. Suffice to say I have still not managed to get the Harmony 885 to work properly with either of the televisions.

Throughout the process the system was letting me download packages which I then ran through the Harmony Remote software. These packages performed the basic set-up operations at the remote end and handled things like learning commands. Having to run them manually may have made the process a bit shaky, because after some of the downloads I would land on error pages and sometimes have to restart a portion of the set-up from square one.

The final major step of the set up is to create macros depending on how you use your devices. This is, perhaps, the biggest feature of the Harmony 885 next to it's ability to converge all your remotes into one handy device. You can, for example, set up an icon with its corresponding button around the screen to turn on your TV, turn off all other devices bar your DVD player, and play the DVD in the drive. The same goes for macros like "Watch TV" and "Play a game" all of which are designed to get your system set up in one button press for anything you might want to do.

Overall the set-up did go fairly smoothly, even though one error is one error too many and may easily confuse the less jaded and more optimistic user… you know, those people who actually expect computers and software to work, rather than the people like me who hang on for the next error so we can waste hours tracking it down and fixing it.

In practice - It took a few tries in some places, but I eventually managed to get the remote set up almost how I would like it barring, unfortunately, the television which patently refused to be controlled properly by anything but the remote it was bundled with.

Each of the Macros worked fine, the TV being an exception. With a fully supported AV set-up I can see the Macro buttons being extremely useful turning several button presses into one. After a macro is used the remote adjusts to control the devices associated with the Macro. Using the "Watch TV" macro, for example, allowed me to control the volume and change the channel all from the one remote - after I had given up and turned the TV on manually, anyway.

If any of the macros fails to work as expected the Harmony 885 includes a help button which performs a basic step-by-step diagnoses of the problem to make sure the commands it is sending are the correct ones. A nice touch!

In addition to the macros the Harmony Remote has a device button which lets you select an individual device in your set-up and adjust the remote to work with it- with a Harmony on your coffee table you will never need an official PS2 remote, that is for sure. Although at about £140 a pop, I should hope so. One of the major benefits of using device selection is that the screen displays all the extra features of your device that don't have button mappings on the remote. You can then page from screen to screen and press the corresponding button on the side of the remote to use that feature.

After remote convergence and its macro ability the next biggest plus of the Harmony Remote is the docking station and rechargeable batteries. I have always thrown cheap batteries into remote and they inevitably run down and start to play up, the electronics in my bedroom alone occupy 20 sockets, so I am not bothered with plugging in an extra device in the living room- accepting cable clutter as something I am just going to have to live with until wireless power becomes reality. Above all the Harmony Remote does look fairly sexy sitting in its cradle on the table, it not only removes the remote clutter but completes any AV system with a stylish accessory.

The Logitech Harmony 885 Universal Remote is a mid-range universal remote for the mid-range home entertainment system. It looks a lot less complicated, far more functional and a lot prettier than most of the low end devices and is several hundred quid shy the price of the high end, filling a neat gap in the market and being a true gadget for us hardcore fanatics. If you just have a TV and a VCR then the Harmony 885 is definitely not for you, but even the simple compliment of TV, DVD, Freeview/Digibox, CD Player and Games Console that I'm sure many people have in their homes would benefit from the elimination of all that remote clutter and the Harmony 885's macro system.