The toaster for techies: a touch-screen and algorithms
While touch screen technology has been around for decades, it wasn’t until 2007 when Apple released the iPhone that widespread adoption and popularization of the most innovative touchscreen technology occurred. Display manufacturers and chip manufacturers raced to integrate touchscreens into the fundamental design of their products. Beyond smartphones, consumers have come to expect touch as the interface of choice in their daily lives.
Today nearly anything can be turned into an interactive surface. Home and kitchen appliances keep getting snazzier with new and improved touch technology. So with all of these technology advances — what’s up with the toaster?
This small kitchen appliance has used the same basic technology—heating coils or filaments for more than 100 years. Sure, we’ve seen “smart” toasters with an internal chip that automatically lowers toast and regulates toasting. And at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2017, Griffin Technology unveiled the Connected Toaster. This was a Bluetooth-enabled smart toaster that came with a smartphone app so you could personalize your perfect toast settings. Surprisingly, or not, the Connected Toaster never had its day. Probably because manually adjusting the lever was just as easy as doing it from your phone.
The first touch-screen toaster … and it comes with algorithms
Enter the Revolution Cooking R180 High-Speed 2-Slice Smart Toaster. Touted as the first touch-screen toaster, it could be a breakfast changer.
Pretty to look at in the morning, the intuitive and well-sized (a bonus if you can’t find your glasses that early in the am) touchscreen lets you select the exact shade and level of crispness from a picture rather than a number. Depending on your breakfast item of choice—bread, bagel, waffle, English muffin or even Pop-Tart®—the toaster’s fancy algorithms automatically calibrate the heating level to the right degree. Revolution Cooking’s proprietary heating method uses diamond coil heating, eliminating the heating coils of the past. This means you get your toast faster with less power and it’s sure to be heated evenly throughout.
Sure, this may be a problem that most of us didn’t realize we had. But whether you’re a toaster or toaster oven person—the pursuit of perfect toast is real. My toaster oven has been indispensable over the last 10 years. When my oven went out, and again when my microwave went kaput, my toaster oven came to the rescue. It’s been both a convenient extra oven and warming drawer. And when I don’t want to heat up the kitchen in the summer (because I refuse to get air conditioning in the Pacific NW after living in Phoenix for 17 years), the toaster oven reigns.
However, one thing that a toaster oven doesn’t do well is ... toast. True. The bread comes out different every time.
But that touch screen is calling my name. Could this be the toaster that trumps my toaster oven?