OTHER TECH

Logitech Harmony 670 universal remote control $150 harmonyremote.com When you're sitting pretty atop the universal-remote market, what do you do to keep challengers from toppling you from your perch? If you're Logitech, you task the Harmony design team to give one of its original - and most successful - models, the 659, a makeover to produce the striking and up-to-date 670.

Three oversize activity buttons at the top of the remote - Watch Movie, Watch TV, Listen to Music - make it easy for anyone to get a system up and running. Coloring the activity buttons means even toddlers (for better or worse) can learn to power things up, letting you catch some extra zzz's on Saturday morning.

Designed with DVR owners in mind, the 670 conveniently puts all transport (Play, Stop, Rewind, and so on) and guide/menu keys within easy thumb-reach of the navigational pad. The 670 also eschews individual navigation buttons for a slimmed-down directional pad - this might prove a challenge to big thumbs.

More buttons mean more control. The 670 adds four that were missing from the 659: Chapter Next and Previous, plus Page Up and Down arrows. Also, it's fully backlit for easy operation in your lights-out media room. - John Sciacca

MusicGremlin Gremlin Wi-Fi player player: $300 service:$15 a month musicgremlin.com Now you can download Thin Lizzy, Air, or just about any band you can think of out of thin air. This Wi-Fi-enabled player, about the size of the original iPod, lets you retrieve music wirelessly through a home or public access point. You can either sign up for a $15-a-month all-you-can-hear subscription or buy songs for 99¢ each.

MusicGremlin quickly found my Wi-Fi network, but I first had to call the company to activate the device before I could download songs.

Once I spelled out "Corinne" on the player, MusicGremlin filled in the "Bailey Rae" part. I then downloaded her tune in about a minute, no computer necessary.

The MusicGremlin found several wireless networks as I walked around New York's Bryant Park, but it couldn't connect to any of them because either a password was required or the player couldn't handle the multimedia-laden "splash" page. But later at a hot spot in an Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights, I was able to download sitar music by Ravi Shankar while passing the parathas.

The MusicGremlin Direct catalog is 2 million tracks deep. (The player's 8-GB hard drive holds about 2,000 songs as MP3 or WMA files.) - Michael Antonoff