I recently saw IBM’s Smart Kitchen that includes several items that are meant to speed up the time you spend in the kitchen while allowing you to spend more time with your family. IBM is known for making many innovative products and like most people, I am always looking at ways to save time so I was really looking forward to seeing what they had to offer. They had 3 products that they were really focusing on: a refrigerator/stove, a multimedia center for the kitchen, and a new refrigerator.

In this article I’ll solely be focusing on the refrigerator/stove, which is an actual stove that includes the functionality of a refrigerator. Basically what you do is prepare the meal ahead of time and put the food in it and turn on the fridge part. When you’re coming home you call the refrigerator/stove and it starts cooking. You can put food in overnight, go to work and while you’re driving home call up the stove, tell it “hi”, and turn the oven on to 350 degrees.

Now, I have mixed emotions about this product. I mean sure it’s great that you can start your stove while you’re headed home, but do you really need the ability to call your appliances. I mean yeah you’re saving the cooking time, but is it really saving you time? I mean while the food is in the oven there’s not a lot to do. I mean if you were at home you’d be doing something else anyway while the food was cooking. It’s not like you have to hand crank the oven.

The other thing with this gadget is the people who normally have time management issues are not really the people who are good at preplanning and preparing meals before hand.

I guess it’s good for someone that has to eat right when they get home, but that’s what an afternoon snack is for.