There’s a remote control for everything these days.

Denizens of the cold wastelands of Canada have remotes to start their cars and trucks on dark winter mornings. There are remotes for radios and TVs, lights and fans, stereos and video players, computers, coffeemakers, washers and driers, and air conditioners.

Now that the iPhone and the iPod Touch can run downloaded applications, even they have become remote controls—although I’ll admit that I can’t figure out what I’d use an iPhone as a remote for. Maybe to pause time, as if I was Arno Strine in Nicholson Baker’s novel The Fermata, or to fastforward to the good parts of life, like Adam Sandler did in Click.

I’ve become so accustomed to using remotes that I want to use them to control all sorts of things. Drunks screaming in the alley late at night? Push a button and they pass out on the nearest pile of garbage. Mounds of trash cluttering the back lane? Tap a key and they disappear.

Of course, most households have so many remotes that someone invented the remote holder, a fabric pocket that hangs over the arm of your sofa or chair, in which the resident remote hog can store the dastardly devices. We’ve got a nice wooden box that sits innocuously enough on the corner of the coffee table in our living room.

In another day, it might have held cigarettes or cigars, but ours is home to five remote controls: one for the television, the stereo, the TiVo, the DVD player, and the PlayStation 3. We use two of them regularly—the ones for the TiVo and the stereo—and the others occasionally.

Thankfully, Logitech has a solution for people like us. The company, which made a name for itself developing peripheral devices for computers, has been releasing universal remote controls for a few years now. The Harmony One—available at NCIX for $279.99—comes the closest to actually combining all of your remotes’ functionality into one gadget.

Like other universal remotes, the Harmony One exists to operate the electronic devices in your living room. But two features separate it from other universals: ease of programming and one-touch, behaviourally based operation.

Universal remotes have to be programmed to work with various devices, but Logitech has simplified this process. Instead of pointing the remote at your TV or stereo and punching in obscure codes, you simply plug the Harmony One into a USB port on your Windows or Mac computer. On-line, you enter information about your devices, and the remote’s programming is done on your behalf.

According to Logitech, its database—updated almost daily—includes more than 225,000 devices from more than 5,000 manufacturers. So if you pick up a new stereo or flat-screen, you can easily assign the remote to work with the new device.

Even better, though, is the innovation that allows for one-touch operation of the remote. Want to watch television? Push the TV button on its colour touchscreen, and the Harmony One automatically activates the devices you need. If you want to watch a DVD or play a video game, all you need to do is press the button that corresponds to that activity, and things turn off and on as necessary.

No longer does everyone in a household need to know what input the Xbox 360 is plugged into. When your parents visit, you don’t have to put up with a frustrated father who can’t figure out how to get the football game on television. Logitech’s move to a design based on users’ behaviour is an example of the kind of paradigm shift that leads to great technological innovations.

As wonderful as the Harmony One is, though, it’s limited in one respect. Like most remote controls, the Harmony One uses infrared radiation. IR remotes send information to the device being controlled using bursts of coded infrared light.

The advantage of using infrared is that the signal is focused and can’t pass through objects, so there’s little possibility of it interfering with other devices. The drawback is that you need to make sure you’re pointing the remote directly at the device. Unless, after a little practice, you’ve figured out how to bounce the signal off the floor, the bookshelf, and then the ceiling. That way, you don’t have to move in order to change the channel.

I expect, though, that we’ll start seeing more remotes using Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth is the radio-based data-transmission technology that’s used to connect your wireless headset with your mobile phone, or that fancy laser mouse with your laptop.

The best remote in my possession is the one for the PlayStation 3, which is our de facto DVD and Blu-ray Disc player. It pairs directly with the PS3, so there’s no chance of interference, and it can activate the console from the other end of our apartment.

When universal remotes—and all of our electronics—are using Bluetooth, we’ll be that much closer to achieving true remote-control harmony.