Review: The Smartphone-Controlled Mr. Coffee Sounds Cooler Than It Actually Is
(Courtesy of Mr. Coffee)
I hate the morning. I’ve long dreamt that cherubic angels would deliver me a steaming hot cup of coffee in bed as soon as the alarm goes off.
Most coffee makers aren’t quite at that level yet, but they’re trying. The Mr. Coffee Smart Coffeemaker, which is available for purchase today, enables you to automatically brew a cup from anywhere, with the push of a button on your smartphone. Meaning that you can turn on the coffeemaker in bed from the other side of your house, watch it brew on your phone or tablet, and know when it’s ready.
It’s a convenient device that cuts out the most annoying step of every morning coffee-making ritual: summoning the power to unhinge yourself from bed. That being said, its capabilities are sadly limited, and it fails to reach the preparation-free coffee nirvana about which everyone fantasizes.
This review comes with a disclaimer: If we’re talking about actual equipment, the Smart Coffeemaker is not for snobs (for that, I will refer you to the coffee-obsessive Matt Buchanan’s excellent recommendations). The device itself is a basic auto-brewer that requires you to grind your own beans or sacrilegiously buy pre-ground coffee powder. On its left side, there’s a slot that can be filled with up to 10 cups of water. On the right, a compartment pops out where you must insert a filter and then the coffee grounds. The whole setup measures about 14½ inches tall and 8½ inches wide, which I found to translate to an appalling amount of counter space.
My tiny Brooklyn studio was not made for this thing. (Alyssa Bereznak/Yahoo Tech)
It’s programmed to heat up water to 205°F, which the National Coffee Association says is the ideal temperature for brewing coffee. Your coffee drips into a 10-cup double-wall, vacuum-insulated “carafe” (read: coffeepot) to keep your coffee warm if waking up takes longer than you expected. Overall, it makes a solid cup.
Beyond that, the Smart Coffeemaker is powered by Belkin’s Wemo app, an Android- and iOS-compatible control center from which you can theoretically control other Internet-connected products, such as Belkin’s smart light switch or even your household’s smart Crock-Pot.
You can also just press the coffee button and it’ll start brewing. (Alyssa Bereznak/Yahoo Tech)
After you’ve downloaded the app and plugged the machine in, you must open up your phone’s Settings app to view your available WiFi networks. The machine will generate one named “WeMo,” which you can then connect to. When you open the WeMo app, it’ll search for and almost immediately recognize the coffeemaker, though my setup included a few frozen screens and pairing problems at first.
Now you have a dashboard from which you can start a pot of coffee immediately, monitor whatever’s in progress, set up a regular brew schedule, and enable remote access. The process of brewing a pot is pretty simple: You press a button, and a little coffee icon begins to pulse as the word “Brewing” appears to the left.
When it finishes, the icon will sprout steam from the cup, indicating that it’s complete, and the time the brewing was completed will appear.
This is where the Smart Coffeemaker turns out to be sort of dumb. It’s supposed to send you a push notification when the brew is complete, but this feature seems to be fatally flawed. I made a cup of coffee with it this morning at 8:30 a.m., and the notification didn’t appear on my lock screen until 1:17 in the afternoon. You’re also supposed to receive push notifications to remind you to fill the machine with water the evening before, but don’t count on that working either.
The app also lacks basic information about how long your beverage will take to brew — something that seems easy to measure, considering that the water compartment of the machine is marked with increments of time (ranging from two to 10 minutes), rather than cups. In its official product description, Mr. Coffee even highlights the fact that the maker is equipped with a new brewing technology that will make you a full pot of coffee in seven minutes. It’s inexplicable why there’s no countdown in your control center.
The water levels are measured by two-minute increments of the time it’ll take for your coffee to brew. (Alyssa Bereznak/Yahoo Tech)
It’s also important to note that this machine cannot quantify the amount of coffee you consume and integrate that information into Apple’s HealthKit app (which coincidentally has a caffeine intake area in its nutrition section).
Though you can’t control most coffeemakers with a smartphone or a tablet, plenty of them do have timers that you can turn on when you prep your coffee setup the night before (a step that, I wearily noted, still remains in the Smart Coffeemaker’s ecosystem). So, really, the only completely novel parts of this machine are its ability to detect whether you’ve filled it with water and the fact that you can turn it on from anywhere in the household.
Ultimately the draw of a smart coffeemaker all boils down to how much more you’re willing to pay for these slight conveniences. For less than $149, the price of the Smart Coffeemaker, you can get a much better brewer like the Bonavita BV1800, or a programmable coffeemaker for less than $100. But if you’re the type of person who literally can’t function before your first cup of coffee in the morning (and I know a lot of you), this machine may still be worth the price.
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