Week in gadgets: Smart frying pan, bacon printer and Galaxy Note Edge delay

24 Nov 2014

Samsung Galxy Note Edge image via Wikimedia Commons

A look at gadget happenings, as a smart frying pan cooks dishes to perfection, the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge has been delayed while a printer now allows you to finally ‘press button, receive bacon’.

Pantelligent: Intelligent pan

Arguably, there have been few innovations in the world of frying pans in the hundreds of years they have been around bar using it as a weapon for comic effect in early sit-coms, but now one company is looking to change that with Pantelligent, a mobile-controlled frying pan that aims to make cooking an exact science.

The Kickstarter project which has already passed its target of US$30,000 with 42 days left on its target date, is designed to allow the user to monitor their food’s progress on the pan through an accompanying app on their phone.

The Pantelligent with a screenshot of the app working with the pan.

By selecting the type of food a person wants to cook, it’s merely a case of putting your food into it and then doing an action once you are notified such as, for example, flipping a steak at the right moment.

The app also shows the pan’s temperature to indicate whether it is too hot or too cool for the food and will allow the person to head off and do other things around the home until they receive an alert on their phone.

The first beta test models are due for release to lucrative backers in the beginning of next year with official release due in august 2015.

Samsung Galaxy Note Edge delayed until December

Samsung’s latest device that has raised a few eyebrows with its curved edge screen has had something of a minor setback following the news that its release on 28 November will now not be going ahead as planned and has been pushed out by two weeks to 12 December.

The first sign that all was not right came after the original pre-order date of 14 November came around and no word was mentioned or page made online to allow people to pre-order the phone.

On top of this, the pre-order time has been shortened to just a week from 5 December either from Samsung’s own website or through one of the official sellers of the phone, Carphone Warehouse.

Square Register now available worldwide

Square, the online payments company founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, now has access to most of the world following their release of their Register app for international use.

In essence, the app turns an iOS or Android tablet into a sales register to process payments and is aimed ‘squarely’ at small businesses such as coffee houses or fashion outlets.

The company’s business model still remains baffling to most financial experts who see the free app as not helping a company that is yet to post a profit but speaking to The Financial Times, Dorsey said their focus is still on developing their financial software, “We don’t think the payments business is a bad business. However, we think there is more opportunity in all the data that we can provide back to our sellers.”

Slow Games – world’s slowest video game

Modern video games are far removed from the world of Pong where slow movements were the limits of technological achievement.

Now however, designer Ishac Bertran has gone out of his way to create the world’s slowest video game that only allows one turn per day.

The small cube gaming console comes in three different designs, each with a different appendage which acts as the console’s controller.

Describing the reasoning behind the incredibly slow game, Bertran says, “The games are based on classic video games (Mario, Pong, etc). By reducing the feedback loop to a frequency of a day, the games take a new perspective and the skills required to make progress are radically different. While traditional video games require good hand-eye coordination and concentration, Slow Games challenge our memory, capacity of observation and patience.”

Bertran goes on to describe the consoles as ‘ambient’ with a desire for them to blend into the background of people’s homes as just a decorative piece in a living room, for example.

By making them incredibly slow, he hopes it will have the opposite effect of a slow-paced game by making a person more engaged with the game over a longer period.

For slow-paced gamers out there, they may have to wait a little bit longer however, as it is still only in a prototype stage.

‘Push button, receive bacon’ printer

The team from The Rabbit Hole may have just won the internet.

Playing off the infamous online meme making fun of the fact a sign on a popular hand-dryer looks like bacon is coming out of the nozzle is now an actual reality … of sorts.

Using a heavily re-purposed laser jet printer, with more fans and heating power, someone using the printer just has to feed the bacon through the printer’s roller and following the pressing of a button, does indeed receive cooked bacon.

The team had entered their bacon printer in Deconstruction, a hackathon of sorts that ‘challenges participants to rethink (deconstruct) the world around them and create something completely new from existing objects and ideas’.

Speaking about their printer, The Rabbit Hole’s Addie said of making the printer as hot as possible, “It said it could get up to 350F, but when we probed it, it measured higher than the max of the thermometer, which was 450F.”

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Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com