Smart Remote by Sevenhugs

I’ve been using the remote for several months and wanted to give it a real shot at winning me over, but I find myself getting annoyed and frustrated at least once a day. The idea behind this all-in-one has quickly gone from functionality to novelty, for me. There are both positives and negatives to this device, and neither outweighs the other. I live in a fairly small condo with at minimum one Echo/Alexa device in each room, but I wanted something simple to help me reduce the need to rely on using my voice, when I can just flip a switch on a remote. I’m tech savvy, so programming the Smart Remote isn’t a problem (maybe even a little fun initially). But now I frequently find myself just grabbing the original remotes which control my various devices, or using Alexa instead. First off the battery in the Smart Remote is atrocious. I went as far as buying additional USB-C docking stations to keep in other rooms, so I have a charging doc to store it in close proximity. It’s also a very temperamental battery that will bounce around from full to empty, and everywhere in between; sometimes with little use. Don’t fall asleep at night with your remote on your bed, because many mornings it’ll be dead in the morning. So back in the charger it goes, and back to your other remotes and Alexa while Smart Remote recharges. Then there’s the issue if you have the pucks to use the Point Mode function. Every time your remote battery dies, you then have to go through the process of reorienting and programming the remote every single time, so I just gave up on even using this feature. It’s a nuisance, and aggravating. Then there’s the issue of frequent connection losses to controlling devices. Hue bulbs often go unfound, Roku devices often lose connections, and be prepared to swipe and swipe and swipe between screens to access various pages to control some of your devices, and the devices that utilize the multi directional swipe pad feature can drive you a bit nuts because the surface is far too sensitive, and you frequently swipe past the point you want it to stop. No matter how much you use it and try to adjust your touch, you’ll never orient yourself to stop this. Things I do like are the ability to group multiple Hue bulbs together and adjust a multi light sourced room all at once. I wish there was a way to integrate my Wink Hub and control the various lights in my home with Zigbee switches and dimmers, so I have to rely on Alexa, or walking up to the switch itself, for those. I’m not lazy, but the idea of having a Smart remote is lost on these. Long story short: There’s both positives and negatives to Sevenhugs’ Smart Remote. It requires patience and tolerance, and you need to do your research and read others’ reviews in addition to mine. Lower your expectations because it will leave you disappointed from time to time. I followed this company from its Kickstarter campaign, but something told me to just wait to buy it, and see the real world reviews. It’s novel, and useful, but know you won’t be tucking all your other remotes too far from reach. I’d love to give it a higher rating, but it’s simply falling short, just as much as it impresses. It wasn’t a cheap purchase, so you need to decide how much you’re willing to spend on a remote that you can feel both equally excited and disappointed about. Am I glad I bought it? Sure. Do I wish it was more reliable? Absolutely. I just wish I could be more excited about a product I’ve coveted for a couple of years, but instead it just falls short, and in time I may find myself looking for a replacement, leaving this one in its charging dock in my guest bedroom for visitors to use.

I’ve had it for one night and it has been amazing so far. Easy to program and customize how you want. Each of my devices, even my denon AVR which need to have input select and sound mode buttons, fits onto a single page each. The customization is great. Scenes are easy to setup and the app is great. I would occasionally have some things change around when I would hit save on the app, but a few seconds later and I had it fixed.I tried 2 separate harmony elites before this and both were glitchy and literally unusable once they bricked while syncing to the hub. This remote is superior in every single way.If you have a harmony elite that somehow works I would still success throwing it into the nearest volcano and getting this instead. The world needs to be rid of Logitech and their crap products.

I love the usefulness of this remote - but you definitely have to be a bit tech minded to get it to where you want. It works flawlessly in terms of connection and function, however, my main gripe is that it is all touch screen. Not having physical buttons makes navigation a bit tricky, and I find myself always pressing the wrong 'button'. Perhaps better haptic feedback would help? Not sure ... Also, the voice thing, but I believe thats coming.

It doesn’t connect to the specified electronics, and always disconnects from the connected electronics. And battery is terrible.

Battery last like 20 min, always need to recharge remote.

Picked one up from BestBuy and arrived today. Set up was tricky had to connect, disconnect WiFi a few times to get the remote recognized in the App. Guess it was trying to connect on a 2.4 Ghz Frequency. Once connected, adding devices (TV, AV Receiver, Amazon Fire TV) was a breeze and the remote functioned as expected. So great job on the universal remote.Here are some of the observations on setting up the Scenes where some minor tweaks might be needed.1. When creating Scenes, It would be nice to check if source is powered ON or Off. Switching between the scene assumes that everything needs to either be turned OFF or turned ON. When switching between scenes, if it can check to see what devices are showing turned ON would be helpful. In my case, took two tries to get the scene. First it shut all devices down, then second brought all devices back On.2. Time Delay for devices and check. A lot of smart devices (TV, Cable, Receivers) have some sort of Operating system which takes time to boot up, the receiver can take say a min, TV turns on first and cable boot up it more than a minute. If there is an option to either check if device up status or time delay, would help on the scenes. I can manually go in different sources and select input after everything is up, however it defeats the purpose of automation of a scene.So universal remote functionality is great, the automation and scene’s is a challenge and needs to be tweaked. For other automation it would be nice if it can integrate with hubs (Samsung or Wink).