9 'Smart' Products Clearly Designed For Stupid Rich People
For those of you who aren't old enough to remember a pre-smartphone world, carrying tiny computers in our pockets and on our wrists has saved humanity from the burden of walking around with physical maps, phone books, and human secretaries. Which is terrible news for unemployed, tiny secretaries, but great news for everyone who struggles with reading maps or learning phone numbers.
The problem is that once we realized our phones were great for smartening up, we assumed everything else would work better with computers in them. We were wrong.
A Robot Solely For Cleaning Your Grill
Don't you hate busting out the grill to cook some delicious Fourth of July steak, only to have to clean off the grill when you're done? What's that? You don't hate cleaning your grill, because running a metal brush over it for 30 seconds is really easy? Well then say hello and then immediately say goodbye to the Grillbot Automatic Grill Cleaner.
Instead of shelling out $6 for a manual scraper and spending less than a minute cleaning your grill, you could drop up to $100 on this robot, charge it for four hours, and then let it go to town on your grill for 10 to 30 minutes or until the grate has been completely reduced to barbed wire.
But still, you never have to clean your grill again! You just have to clean the robot instead by disassembling it and putting the brushes in the dishwasher! Or, more likely, you forget about the robot and leave it to its business, dooming it to a fiery death the next time you go to preheat the grill. On the bright side, at least you were dumb enough to drop a hundred dollars on a device that makes an easy task longer and more difficult. You'll always have that.
A Blanket With Built-In Speakers
Summer is that one time of year where you can head out to your local park, roll out a blanket, lie down, and appreciate the beauty of the great outdoors, at least until you remember that video games are way better. There's only one thing that could possibly improve this 30-minute period: blasting some sick beats directly on either side of your head.
Thankfully, the Speaker Blanket has you covered. Instead of plugging a pair of headphones into your iPhone and listening to your favorite tunes privately, you can shove a pair of AA batteries into a blanket, connect your music player to that blanket, and force everyone around you to suffer through the playlist you created for this very occasion. And hopefully the family next to you won't have the exact same blanket. If they do, the Amazon reviews suggest one of you won't be listening for long, because the speaker-in-blanket technology isn't all that great and your speakers will probably break before the picnic basket is unpacked.
A Diaper That Tells Your Phone When It's Soiled
Up until now, if your baby made a mess in their diaper, the only way for you to tell was by doing literally anything -- listening for the child crying, checking the color-change part of the diaper, or getting close and seeing if your baby smells like the dark prince Satan made flesh. However, by developing a thin plastic circuit that can detect changes in diaper wetness, researchers believe they've found a better way. These researchers are wrong.
Unveiled by Japanese scientists in early 2014, the highly flexible device can be manufactured for only a few cents and is capable of detecting moisture, temperature, pressure, and more. These could be used to easily detect leaking pipes, determine if food is spoiling, or observe a hospital patient's medical condition. Instead, the researchers decided that they should have baby poop all over it. Yellow, mustardy baby poo.
The device can send a signal to your phone when the diaper has been Jackson Pollocked, which is a bit easier than removing the child's pants (or the elderly patient's pants) to check if the diaper has changed color. However, when the devices were unveiled in February 2014, they could only project a signal a few inches, which means you would have to hover your phone around your baby's tush like you're trying to take incredibly illegal pictures. Plus, nobody wants to take the time to sync their phone to a diaper before putting it on a baby.
Or do they?
Update: No, they don't.
A Smart Carton To Tell You When Eggs Are Bad
We all love eggs, but we also can all agree that eggs need to be whinier. Wouldn't it be great if your eggs could text you if they were getting bent out of shape? Well now your dreams can come true, thanks to the Quirky Egg Minder.
This egg carton has indicator lights to let you know which egg is oldest and which eggs are about to go bad, since there's obviously no other way on Earth to tell if an egg is rotten, now that the robots have eradicated every human's sense of smell and sight.
Not only that, but this carton can also send you a phone alert to let you know when an egg has gone bad, because that's the sort of emergency situation we need to know about right away. Now you can preserve the sanctity of your refrigerator by going out and buying more eggs the millisecond one of them goes bad, thank GOD.
Bizarrely, this smart carton holds 14 eggs. When was the last time you or anyone in the universe bought 14 eggs? That alone makes us question the "smart" qualifications of this smart carton.
An Umbrella That Will Never Let You Leave
Think of all the things you would love to be able to immediately locate or get a reminder about when you're about to leave it behind. Your keys? Your phone? That would be a must-have invention. Now, through the brilliance of Davek, you never again have to worry about losing your ... umbrella.
The Davek Alert is an umbrella that has wireless technology built into the handle and can sync with your increasingly burdened phone. If you find yourself walking away from your umbrella, it will send you a signal when you get more than 30 feet away, angrily reminding you that it won't be ignored, Sarah.
While losing an umbrella does happen from time to time, there are only so many places that you can leave one -- unlike your phone, which can end up in the litter box for all we know. Plus, if you end up leaving it in a cab, you're not going to know about it until your umbrella is well on its way to starting a new life without you. This didn't stop Davek from launching multiple successful Kickstarter projects based on the idea. Who knows? Maybe they're onto something. There's a lot of purchasing power in Seattle.
A Bread Basket That Charges Your Phone
It's the newest product from the Dartboard School of Technology. Keep your bread warm and charge your phone at the same time!
This confusing piece of technology is a product of Sister Schubert's, a baked goods company, and is called the Basket of Warmth. It keeps your bread warm at dinnertime, and it charges your phone at the same time. That's ... pretty much all there is to it. It can go in your cabinet right next to your blender which also takes phone messages.
The nice thing is that phones hide underneath the basket while they're charging, slowly becoming more delicious-smelling as their batteries refill, forcing members of your family make awkward conversation with each other over Thanksgiving. Apparently, this device is intended to get people putting away their phones at mealtimes and actually talking to each other, seemingly not realizing that avoiding conversation is why we have our phones out in the first place.
And hopefully they'll have an app for wiping off the butter that's collected on your phone during dinner.
Read The Weather Forecast On Your Toast
Here's the scenario: You've moved into a new home, and your significant other has given you $1,500 to buy appliances for the kitchen. Doing some research, you see that you could get a stove, a refrigerator, and a dishwasher for that amount of money if you shop smart. So you head out to go shopping, and you come back several hours later with a single countertop toaster oven.
The June Oven is a $1,500 "smart" oven, because someone involved in the decision had to be smart. It's capable of detecting what sort of food you put in there and cooking it appropriately, showing you a live feed of what your food looks like while it's cooking (and providing a time-lapse video), and giving your phone a notification when your food is done. Alternatively, you can buy a normal toaster oven for $25, look up cooking times online, pay attention to your food, and still have $1,475 left over for a gold-plated toilet. Then again, if having to press a hundred buttons to cook toast is good enough for Ashton Kutcher, who are we to judge?
If you only have $80 to spend on a toaster, and you coincidentally don't have any time to check the weather report as you're getting ready in the morning, then your incredibly specific need can be filled by the Toasteroid, which will burn the forecast into your bread. Simply set your particular burn design on your Toasteroid app, and watch as the results show up on your toast a few minutes later. If you're like Reviewed.com and are wondering why you can't check the weather on your phone as your toast cooks, Toasteroid has a response for you: Shut up.
On second thought, getting the temperature burnt onto your toast everyday is some magical second-level Harry Potter sorcery. We can get behind this one.
A Smart Coffee Mug For Immediate Temperature Control
If you're buying coffee from Starbucks, then you probably have some extra money on hand, and not a lot of time. So what do you do when you need your venti Mocha Latte Brangelina at exactly 115 degrees Fahrenheit as soon as possible? You drop $150 on a smart mug, obviously.
This mug is being sold at certain Starbucks locations, and it -- say it with us now -- connects to your smartphone, which is slowly getting less smart with each ridiculous appliance you connect to it. The mug can quickly cool your coffee to a desired temperature, then keep it there for as long as the batteries hold out. On the bottom is a live display which can show numbers, or words, or judge you for your terrible taste if you put home-brewed coffee into it by mistake.
The project has attracted a number of investors, such as Demi Lovato, Ndamukong Suh, and Nick Jonas. In case you still needed to be sold on this magical wonder product, they even produced a commercial for it which looks like it was made by Dunder-Mifflin.
Companies Are Competing To Make The Ultimate Toothbrush
Hold on, didn't we make "smart" toothbrushes years and years ago? You can buy an electric toothbrush at the pharmacy for only a few bucks. What else do we need? Obviously, the answer is a toothbrush that shames you.
Earlier this year, Philips introduced the $200 Sonicare FlexCare Platinum Connected, right before they fired their entire marketing department. It doesn't brush for you, but it will record how you're brushing and then tell you how terrible you are at it once you're done. A map of your mouth will appear on your phone, showing the areas where you could improve, giving you the guidance your family and friends ultimately could not.
If that's not enough to get you brushing better, how about a terrifying video of the inside of your mouth?
Onvi has invented the $400 Prophix toothbrush, which will stream video of the entire tooth-brushing experience to your phone. If you somehow avoid getting motion sickness from trying to brush your teeth and inspect your mouth with a constantly moving camera, you can take pictures of your cavities or other problems and show them to your dentist on your next visit, who will promptly ask you why you spent $400 on a toothbrush instead of cutting back on the SweeTarts.
Also check out 5 Breakthroughs In Tech (That Make Us Look Really Dumb) and 5 Ways Modern Technology Is Ruining Your Life.
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