GE's next smart home appliance? A giant tablet for your kitchen
But can you reach it?
GE Appliances wants you to buy a massive 27-inch tablet called the Kitchen Hub for your culinary sanctum, and no, it's not intended as a replacement cutting board.
Instead, the tablet, announced during CES 2018, will sit perched directly above your stove, doubling as an exhaust hood while somehow avoiding heat damage and serving as a central hub for all the smart appliances GE hopes you have.
Not only does it provide a one-stop shop for all your various smart gadgets in the kitchen, but it also allows you to look up recipes on the internet, access your calendar and make video calls with an outward-facing camera.
Beyond that, you could use it to see who's at the front door with the smart cameras you that you, presumably, have installed.
For that matter, if you want to show off whatever it is that you're cooking on the stove, a downward facing camera will let you take a photo or video and broadcast it to Facebook or Instagram.
Screening process
The Kitchen Hub isn't expected to ship until sometime later in the year (and likely only in the US), but GE Appliances is expected to put up a display unit this week at CES. We'd love to see it in action, if only to learn if the interface is still reachable if you're less than six feet tall.
Pricing is also currently a mystery, but we'll let you know if we learn something later in the week.
Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox
Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.
The GE Appliances Kitchen Hub is but one of touchscreen-toting devices for the kitchen that we've seen at this year's CES. Judging from units like the Samsung Family Hub refrigerator, screens may soon be as common a sight in kitchens as knives and spices.
- New year, new tech – check out all our coverage of CES 2018 straight from Las Vegas, the greatest gadget show on Earth!