Just what the world needs: Android in the rice cooker
Less than a fortnight into 2013, we have a candidate for the year’s silliest product: a networked, Android-sporting rice cooker. Readers will remember some chilling demonstrations during 2012: the vulnerability of pacemakers to outside attack, for example (insulin pumps were already compromised in 2011), while McAfee (the …
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Re: It's easy to be cynical
You meant providing the data in an advertising industry standard protocol.
rice cooker
a traditional rice cooker, without any fancy features, is one of the most simple devices you'll find in a kitchen. It's basically just a kettle with the thermostat set just above 100°C. Whilst the water is boiling the temperature won't go over 100, as soon as the water is gone the temperature rises and the cooker turns off.
Until the rice cooker can load it's own rice and water I see no need for it to be controlled by anything other than plugging it into the wall.
Re: rice cooker
I think you have a different definition of "traditional" then I do. My grandmother's is a metal pot with a wood lid. It doesn't have a heating element of any kind. I think it's steel, but here is a similar cast-iron pot:
http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/buk-r/item/031-025/
What clown would buy that? And at that price?
mind you. If it were made by apple...
It probably takes as long to twat about finding the 'recipe' (think just add a coupla cardomom and a pinch of turmeric for pilau rice, too hard to remember?) and setting the damned thing up as it does to boil a kettle and chuck the water and extras into a pot with a fistful of basmati.
Mind you, we did have the Segway stomach emptier for the terminally lardy the other day I spose... Can't help thinking tech is making 20% of the human race smarter and 80% dumber. Still, gives 20% of us a market for the weird shit we invent I guess.
My parents got one of them fuzzy logic rice cookers as a gift from their Chinese student lodgers. It does make very good rice which is 'chopstick friendly'. Perhaps an android one would let us change the language, so we know what is happening. Rather than the little house with 3 sticks over it is flashing....
"Lets users search for recipes on their Android phones and then transmit them to the cooker"
And then what? The rice cooker reads the recipe, assembles the ingredients, skins, chops and browns the chicken, peels, slices and adds the onion... (depending on the recipe, obviously)?
How can it do anything more complex than "Boil the rice currently inside you, using the water also currently inside you."?
But first...
before it skins and chops the ingredients it should be able to order them from Tesco.
(or even easier, just phone an order to the nearest takeaway...)
Context is everything
I used to work for a large Japanese electronics firm.
The catalogue for the staff shop (in Japan) had pages-and-pages of different ricer cookers models. And that was just he ones they made.
They are a major small-white-goods item in japan. A "smart" one makes perfect sense in that market.
But maybe not in Barnsley. (Or where-ever.)
There is no android in the rice cooker
You just control the rice cooker with an android app…
Linux / Android in everything that's pricey
That's how the world is going. The year of Linux on the desktop is not here (yet...) but it's in everything else. (Android having a Linux kernel).
Re: Linux / Android in everything that's pricey
Java is in a lot a pricey items. Doesn't mean it's good.
Personally I like Linux but fanbois will be fanbois. Bloody annoying.
Continuing windows cooker theme - WINDOWS 8 COOKER
Please wait whilst your cooker installs important updates. 15... 30 ....
Please do not turn off your cooker whilst windows configures your cooker, please wait...
Sorry, windows cooker can only let you cook one thing at a time. If you can figure out where the cook button is...
Your cooker requires anti-virus to run.
You can't cook anything tasty without an upgrade to premium edition.
Oh dear, It's burned. OK. Retry.. Fail
Oh dear, your cooker has a virus.
Windows has detected a new hot plate. You will need to re-Activate your Windows Cooker.
Re: Continuing windows cooker theme - WINDOWS 8 COOKER
Don't joke - my TV now needs to reboot to install updates, and my Android Galaxy Nexus phone takes longer to boot than my Windows laptop, I'm sure we'd have laughed at that idea 10-15 years ago too!
(I'm not sure why you specify Windows though - it's a certain other, mobile, OS that seems to have trouble with multitasking. And as much as I love Linux, Ubuntu has the same issue with always needing updates and rebooting, more so than Windows, as do Android and my TV.)
Re: Continuing windows cooker theme - WINDOWS 8 COOKER
@Mark, I've never had issues with Android or Linux needing to reboot. (I use Linux Mint 12, having given up on Ubuntu). Windows however (work) is forever requiring rebooting.
Kill this with some pie!
Someone please take a $50 Black and Decker (or what ever the Brits have on the cheap) with a raspberry Pi and blow this thing out of its rice filled water! :)
Doomed, I tells ya...
What happens when you cooker gets hacked? Does SkyNet then live in your kitchen appliances?
$600 that is quite a lot of foreign domestic workers
... just sayin!
Android is a name to slap on things to sell them. It's worse than sticking an Apple logo on stuff to sell it.
I don't know why they don't rename Linux and call it Android. Then perhaps Linux on the desktop would take off.
Not so fast ...
This kind of integration of Android OS with a domestic appliance could be extremely useful to people with disabilities. For example, a visually impaired person can interact easily with later versions of Android OS, which could make it possible for them to lead more independent lives. We should be very careful when we rubbish innovation, as the real benefits might not be readily apparent, and may not be what the manufacturer even had in mind!
Must be better than the iGrill (It is ~ 6 times the price so by Apple logic must be 6 times as good.)
I remember...
Bernard Levin devoted a whole Times page to fulminating against Sony's then novel idea of a shower radio. I immediately went out and bought one. It's still going strong, having comfortably outlived its palaverous detractor.
Just saying.
Network addressed?
It had better use IPv6, I don't want to have to NAT my rice cooker.
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