Would you like smart rice with that?

March 19th, 2012

Appliance News Small Appliances

Wunderkids of the tech world, the Japanese will forever impress and surprise us with their inventions. There’s the bullet train, robots, and camcorders, or butter in a stick,  tankless toilets, and the subway sleepers.

Now Panasonic has combined two great Japanese loves: smartphones and rice.

Recently revealed, the SR-SX2 is a smartphone integrated rice cooker (incidentally, the Japanese – Mitsubishi –  first invented the electric rice cooker in the 1940s).

Using an Android smartphone users can control the cooker by touching the phone to a blue icon on top of the machine. The names of the settings users can choose from are similarly inventive and bedazzling: ‘200-degree Steaming,’ ‘Great Thermal Dancing Boil’ and ‘Diamond Furnace’.

Ingenious and inane, the range of Japanese inventions is long and curious

As much as the Japanese are imaginative and innovative, their practical side rules. The app can also be used to connect to Panasonic’s recipe sharing cloud server, six of which can be saved directly to the cooker. Another 100 recipes can be stored on the cloud server.

Of course, like much of Japan’s fabulously advanced technology, the roundabout $1000 cooker will probably stay in the land of the rising sun.

Meanwhile, Tiger Corporation has also been perfecting the art of multitasking rice making with the tacook, which can heat up a side dish in a separate compartment whilst the rice is cooked in the other.

The subway sleeper relies on the kindness of fellow travellers to wake you up when you reach your stop, as signalled by the yellow sign - good luck with that