eric rochow : social media handyman

I was in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle last nite and Time Warner Cable had a display of a “wireless” kitchen.

Prominent is a “Samsung H269LB/SH wireless ICE pad” fridge. It has a built in LCD screen for watching cable TV as well as some rudimentary software for tracking food inside it and leaving messages for other household members.

The demonstration person showed me how one can watch different channels on the refrigerator screen, but she kept pointing the remote control toward a cable box 6 ft away rather than the screen.

I asked if one could use the remote with the panel on the fridge, instead of having to always point to the set top box. My thinking being the set top box would probably be in the living room, not somewhere in the kitchen. No, I was told, the set top box would be in the kitchen, as part of the ‘digital kitchen’.

I thought the promise of the wireless functionality would be to not have yet another box one had to have. Having a fridge be wireless is handy in a sense, but you’re not going to move the fridge around like a laptop.

A better version of this would be an LCD screen that received signals from a set top box somewhere else in the house, which could be controlled via a remote that functions with the fridge. The wireless component would then become a truly helpful thing, rather than just a buzzword.