Cantata Haptique RS90 Universal Remote Review: Not Yet Great

When Logitech signaled the extremity of the cosmopolitan distant epoch by announcing the decease of its Harmony merchandise enactment successful April 2021, I was bittersweet to spot it go. Though it had dominated the cosmopolitan distant marketplace for astir of the preceding 20 years, Logitech’s Harmony had go a relic. As streaming eclipsed carnal media, arsenic affordable astute TVs with built-in apps proliferated, and arsenic HDMI-CEC became a ubiquitous mode for devices to speech to each other, the request for a programmable, cosmopolitan infrared distant gradually dissipated. Even the summation of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to Harmony’s power toolbox couldn’t prevention it from rapidly declining sales.

Still, galore folks person held connected to their bequest IR devices and person added newer, Bluetooth, and networked gadgets to their astute homes. For them, a true, whole-home distant that doesn’t outgo a luck oregon necessitate a nonrecreational integrator would beryllium enthusiastically welcomed.

That’s the elevator transportation for the Cantata Haptique RS90 cosmopolitan distant (€349/$406): Based connected an Android platform, the RS90 promises to bash everything a top-of-the-line Harmony could do, positive acold more, including dependable commands—a diagnostic Logitech ne'er successfully implemented.

In theory, the RS90 should beryllium the past distant you’ll ever need. In reality, it’s a beauteous portion of hardware that has a agelong mode to spell if it ever wishes to presume the cosmopolitan distant throne that Logitech abandoned.

A New Friend

Even though my ain Harmony Elite had been gathering particulate for much than a year, my interior geek celebrated the accomplishment of a caller procreation of cosmopolitan remotes.

It doesn’t wounded that the Haptique RS90 is precise casual connected the eyes. It eschews the accustomed button-festooned glossy integrative baton successful favour of a sleek, angled aluminum chassis. The bottommost information sports a elemental (and backlit) 24-button keypad, portion the apical features a 3.1-inch colour touchscreen and an IR emitter. It looks similar Bang & Olufsen’s ahead-of-its-time 1991 Beolink 7000 remote, but reimagined for today’s devices.

Under the hood, the RS90 packs smartphone levels of computational firepower: an ARM Octacore processor with 3 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, and some Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. It has a built-in mic and talker and comes with a charging cradle to support its interior artillery topped up erstwhile not successful use. A customized mentation of Android 12 runs the full show, with Cantata’s bundle arsenic the default experience. Canata plans to merchandise a fancier mentation known arsenic the RS90x that uses an OLED screen, has much interior storage, and possesses a fingerprint scholar and, crucially, an IR receiver (something the RS90 notably lacks).