Features & Specifications
The Harmony 700 sells for $149.99 and can replace up to six remote controls. The 700 gets power from a pair of Sanyo Eneloop batteries that are included with the device. The batteries are good for a week's use per charge. Other features of the remote include a color screen, and support for over 5000 different brands of home theater components from game consoles to TVs and Blu-ray players.

In Use
The Harmony 700 is very similar in key layout to the Harmony One and the Harmony 900 remotes that I have reviewed before. The biggest visual different between the 700 and the 900 is that the 700 is made from flat black plastic rather than the glossy plastic and lacks the ergonomic back that the Harmony One features that help to guide your hands to the correct buttons in the dark.

The Harmony 700 can replace six different remotes as I mentioned before, this is another key difference between the low-end 700 and the higher-end Harmony remotes that can support many more components. The Harmony 700 programs with the same software as the other Harmony devices. You download the software, connect the remote via the PC USB port with the included cable and enter the brand and model of your components to program. Once the components are entered, you are ready to set up the activities for the remote.

The Harmony 700 has hard keys for activities like watch TV, watch movie, listen to music, and more activities at the very top of the remote. Unlike the One and the 900, the Harmony 700 lacks a touch screen. If you don’t want to use one of the main activities on the top of the remote, you use the four hard keys located around the color screen to select your activity.

Programming the Harmony 700 I tested took a bit more time than usual. I put the Harmony 700 on my TV in the upstairs game room of my home. The Viewsonic TV that I use up there was in the Harmony software database, but the inputs were misnamed and out of order. That meant that when I hit an activity the inputs were never correct.

The issue was easy enough to fix and took me about 15 minutes of tweaking. Thankfully, the software is set up to allow you to enter other inputs that might be missing by telling the software exactly what keys are pressed to access the menu. You can also rearrange the order the remote thinks the inputs were in, which was what was needed to fix the issue I was having.

I particularly like the baked in color-coded keys on the remote for red, green, yellow, and blue. This makes accessing the features of my DirecTV DVRs very easy. On my Harmony One downstairs in my home, I have to use virtual keys for the color coded buttons. The Harmony 700 may be cheap, but it still features backlit keys as well.

Once programmed the Harmony 700 is a fantastic remote and works very well. Now my son can turn on the Xbox upstairs and get things working correctly without me having to schlep up stairs each time to do it for him. The only thing that I don’t like about the Harmony 700 is that is doesn't have a charge cradle. You have to plug the USB cable that ships with the remote into an AC to USB adapter to charge the remote. It's not difficult for adults, but on a TV where kids will be the majority user as is my case, it means that they can’t charge the remote themselves because of difficulty for young kids handling the cable connection.