Graham
on
There’s been a push to make appliances smarter over the past decade. It started with the $15,000 fridge that had an LCD TV built in, and moved on to a myriad of new shapes and sizes, in-door cooling, freshenators, and other fascinating tech that was much more useful. Probably the best thing to happen to appliances is the agreement that the industry would, if it could be helped, avoid acknowledging that the could “bisque” ever existed.
In the last three years the efforts of major manufacturers have reached a fever pitch. As relative newcomers like LG and Samsung try to carve out a share of the market for themselves they’ve been directing their initiatives towards innovation; by offering new and impressive technology in the kitchen they hope to break customers out of a ten-year cycle of replacing appliances while simultaneously getting them to consider their non-traditional brands.
It’s worked; satisfaction and reliability ratings remain high for these brands and consumers have accepted them as part of the mainstream. Thankfully that hans’t slowed the flow of innovative ideas out of these relative rookies.
This year at CES both Samsung and LG have devoted a large section of display space to smart appliances; these are devices that connect to your home network or feature paradigm shifting technologies that may change how we look at home cooking and cleaning.
I dropped by Samsung this morning and took some time to investigate their offerings. The first was the Flex Duo range; a cooker that takes a surprising smart approach to decreasing cooking time and increasing energy efficiency. How does it work? You might find this forehead-slappingly simple: it uses a metal insert to separate your oven into two separate cavities on demand. That means that you can cook one dish in a much smaller space (that will heat faster and cook quicker) or you can cook two different dishes in each cavity. Need one big stove for a big bird/tofurkey? Yank the metal plate and the Flex Duo becomes the Flex Single-o (my term). Handy.
Next up was Samsung’s ‘lifehub’ fridge (it was actually labelled in broken English as “Hub of your living”…. Samsung, if you need someone to proof this stuff I’m available Friday though Sunday starting at 5pm). It’s a cool little ditty that has a smart tablet inserted in the front of the fridge. The 8” colour LCD is Wi-Fi enabled, giving you access to a handful of Samsung pre-installed apps like Twitter, Epicurious, and more. Samsung was unable to confirm if we’d be able to install our own apps (what, you don’t think a Fridge App Store would fly?) and sadly has neglected the killer app for a smart fridge: a device that tracks your food inventory and lets you know when things are going bad. It’s a no-brainer and I sincerely hope they get an app developer on it. Furthermore, put a barcode scanner in there so we can simply scan stuff as it goes in!
Two cool additions to the smart fridge were the smart dividers in the drawer-height compartment. These sliding metal bars make it easy to divide your fridge for different sizes of food. The second smart addition is easy-pull handles, the pull bar for the lower doors tilts slightly to give you a better angle and more leverage.
That wraps up Samsung in the kitchen, so I’ll tackle LG a bit later… after I’ve had some lunch.
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