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Review: Beyond Connected Home Kitchen
It's no secret that I prefer the Windows CE operating system. In fact, for several years I tried to hide the fact that my kitchen was equipped with Audrey, a Palm-powered Internet Appliance which worked poorly at best. Now, Salton Incorporated brings Windows CE into the kitchen with the Beyond Connected Home line of appliances. One of the first product lines to truly connect devices with each other and the Internet. THE BEYOND CONNECTED HOME CONCEPT Like a computer network, the Beyond Connected Home theory bonds common appliances in your household to help relieve the everyday monotony of making coffee, bread and microwave foods. These appliances connect with a central computer (either the iCEBOX Entertainment Center or the Beyond Home Hub) to receive updated recipes, the exact atomic time, and communicate their current status back to the iCEBOX or Home Hub.
THE iCEBOX IS ESSENTIAL The iCEBOX (Countertop model shown at top of page) is the key to the entire system. As a stand-alone appliance, it is a powerful entertainment system, housing a built-in DVD/CD player, TV Tuner, FM Radio and video input for monitoring your kids or the front door. The iCEBOX also includes Internet Explorer 5.0 for surfing the Web and checking web-based E-mail like Yahoo! or Hotmail. And, since it is designed specifically for kitchen, the iCEBOX includes a wireless keyboard and remote control that are waterproof. Although the iCEBOX includes an Ethernet networking card, WiFi is only supported by adding a Cisco Aironet 350 card, which is difficult to obtain and costs over $100. Beyond is reportedly working on their own brand of WiFi card which will be available in the near future for $50. We consider WiFi an essential feature, since the majority of homes are now networked with wireless Internet, and having the iCEBOX on WiFi allows you to position the unit anywhere in the kitchen. Once you connect the iCEBOX to the Internet, it serves as a "link to the Beyond mothership" to allow the microwave and bread maker to download new recipes and set the correct atomic time on all of the appliances. Each device also reports back to the iCEBOX with it's current status (shown below).
THE APPLIANCES Bar code scanners are built in to the bread maker and microwave, allowing you to start cooking just by waiving the wand over the product's UPC symbol, putting the food in and pressing Start. Having the barcode scanner on the Beyond Microwave Oven inherently offers something that other microwaves cannot -- complex cooking advice. In our test kitchen, we scanned items that had multi-step instructions (for example, cook for 2 minutes, 45 seconds, stir, then cook for an additional 2 minutes). The Beyond Microwave automatically paused at the correct moment and prompted us to stir the food and then, when the item was placed back in the microwave, resumed the cooking process. We also tried scanning items that had just come out (like a new brand of microwave popcorn) and -although it had to be downloaded via the iCEBOX- the Beyond Microwave was updated to cook the items. The Beyond Bread Maker benefits from the same type of barcode scanner, but offers considerably fewer recipes (just a few hundred, compared to 4,000 recipes on the Microwave). However, this may be because it stores the information to mix, let rise, and cook bread mixes, as well as offering pizza dough cake mixes, . The bread maker also includes a delayed start feature that is unique because it is set by time of day, rather than setting a specific time delay. One critically missing feature is the ability to log in from work and set or change the bread maker's timer. The last kitchen appliance announced by Beyond is the coffee maker (shown below). Planned to be available in the first quarter of 2005, this coffee maker is designed around your schedule, with the ability to start brewing at a different time every day and even be managed from a Web browser. The coffee pot has a built-in 'Grind and Brew' feature and can recover its cooking schedule, date and time after a power outage. The Home Hub and iCEBOX can monitor the coffee pot including “Coffee Brewing" and "Coffee Ready" status messages, and the Home Hub will display a notification if you forget to prepare you coffee the night before.
It is also important to note that the "networked" features of the coffee maker, bread maker and microwave each require a SANI card, sold separately (approximately $50). And, like the exclusion of WiFi from the iCEBOX unit, we feel that this is another corner that should not have been cut. To nickel and dime your customers when you're selling a system worth thousands of dollars is unacceptable behavior, and should have been avoided by simply including the technology in each appliance. BEYOND: NOT COMING SOON TO A BEDROOM NEAR YOU...? In private discussions with company insiders, the future was not completely bright. The Home Hub product, a bedside companion that acts as an alarm clock, weather station and CD player, may not make it to market. Although it is scheduled to launch in the 2nd quarter of 2005, the product has suffered countless delays and may be scrapped while most of the features are rolled into the iCEBOX Internet appliance.
It is not completely clear if the weather forecasts, personal financial portfolio and family calendar (with web interface) originally planned for the Home Hub would be available on the iCEBOX, but there are two bigger problems with this product not making it to market. First, the ability to manage and monitor kitchen appliances (especially the coffee pot) from the bedroom is a key necessity for avid home automation buffs. And second, the Home Hub at $500, offered a much more reasonable way to manage your Beyond Home appliances than the iCEBOX at 3-4 times the cost.
SUMMARY Although the system promises the ultimate in kitchen connectivity, the Beyond Connected Home falls short in many different areas. For the $2,350 price tag to equip your kitchen, you could hire a butler and a hooker to do ten times the amount of work. Of course, the iCEBOX is an incredible Internet appliance all on its own. And once you've paid the considerable sum to purchase the iCEBOX Internet appliance, completing the set with all of the Beyond appliances is almost a no-brainer purchase. PURCHASE:
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