An Oven That Runs Android 123
Google85 writes "Dacor is exhibiting an oven that runs Android at CES 2013: it pulls together a 1GHz processor, 512MB of DDR2 RAM and Android 4.0.3. It also cooks food. At the front of the Discovery Wall Oven, there's a 7-inch LCD touch panel. From the article: '...The oven-maker's Discovery IQ controller cooking app will offer up interactive cooking guides, recipes and all other things cooking, although you'll still be able to install more standard apps from Google Play. The built-in cooking app offers preprogrammed dishes and adjustable timings for several dishes, while you can even program the oven to cook food remotely from any Android device.'"
Re:5 years from now (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's going to be a "smart" device I would expect it to be about the same build quality as phones and MP3 players. In 5 years the batteries wont hold a charge, the door wont stay shut and you'll have to put a rubber band on it to keep the on button pushed in. Then you can justify getting a new one!
Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally! Appliances that last less than two years. Regular shoddy merchandise cut the replacement time to about 5 years, but that wasn't good enough. We need appliances on a two year update cycle. This is especially true for the refrigerator. The damned things last for decades. Decades, I tell you! That lousy refrigerant that also lubricates the pump. Awful stuff. Finally we can get those on a two-year upgrade cycle too.
Oh, BTW, "we" are the manufacturers. Customers? I think we heard of those one time. We turned them into "consumers". They WILL comply.
Could be useful (Score:5, Interesting)
I know the consensus on /. is going to be that this idea is totally silly.
But, I can think of a few features I wouldn't mind having on a smart oven:
* It joins my home network, and I can put a widget on my desktop showing current oven temperature and the value of any countdown timers running.
* It has optional temperature probes, so if you want to do your meat right, instead of cooking by time you cook until the meat hits the correct temperature. And the current temperature appears on the desktop widget I mentioned above, and an alert fires when the temperature hits a certain value.
I have a meat temperature probe that came complete with a remote display/alarm. (The worst thing about it: if you take it out of range, it never goes off. It really should have a "watchdog" feature where it says "hey, I haven't received a heartbeat in a while, I must be out of range or something" and the alarm goes off.) I would love having the oven on my home network, using open protocols; let's face it, if I'm waiting for a pie to cook or something I'm going to be at my computer.
I can think of sillier ideas.
* Lots of fancy cook cycles. I looked at TFA and it seems they already have this one covered.
* QR codes on foods you cook in the oven, and you wave them past a cheap camera on the oven and it sets up the cook cycle!
* Multiple, convenient, named timers. The "Pie0" timer is almost done, but the "Pie1" timer has another ten minutes on it. I wouldn't buy one just for this, but I'd use it if I had it.
* Voice input for things like setting timer names?
This isn't the hottest idea I've ever heard, but it's not completely half-baked.
Re:Could be useful (Score:4, Interesting)
After the technology takes off, I then would like to get some photo recognition software going. My ideal oven will indicate when food is done by using color and pattern recognition that it downloaded from the Internet along with the recipe.
blast from the past (Score:3, Interesting)
"In the future, the proof of a person's technical skill will be based on their
ability to boot linux on random objects. Those who are able to get a bash
prompt on a toaster oven will be gods that walk among us, constantly harping
on our choice of distribution."
--deathbyzen (slashdot.org 14-Dec-05)