This 27-inch Android touchscreen could transform your kitchen

Step-by-step instructions for recipes for timers, video streaming and smart home controls, smart displays to make great kitchen assistants. Most fit perfectly to your countertop with a small footprint and a portable design, but GE has a broader vision for your smart kitchen. Specifically, a 27-inch Android tablet built into a premium hood vent that costs $ 1,200.

Stay with me. It may sound ridiculous, and this model may not be impressive enough for me to recommend it at the current price of $ 1,200, but I liked the product a lot more than I thought. GE's vision is not blurry here, and it will not surprise me when smart cooking embraces big screens.

The basics

The kitchen hub ($ 1,073 on Amazon) follows the look of a high-end microwave in terms of design. It is available in four finishing options to match your other appliances: stainless steel, black stainless steel, matt white and matte black.

A 27-inch touch screen covers the front of the hub and includes two cameras. There is a front lens to capture images and videos of people in your kitchen and a camera mounted on the screen for footage of what you have on your stove.

The Kitchen Hub is also a kitchen hood with respectable speed above average, with four speeds of up to 600 CFM (cubic feet per minute). Three LED light bars illuminate the cooktop and an automatic fan mode turns the fan on whenever it detects excessive heat. It can move air at four different speeds and evacuate exhaust gases horizontally or vertically, or recirculate if you do not have a ventilation duct in your walls.

Hoods from all other brands start at $ 500 and go well in the $ 1,500 range. These are without intelligence, with only a few LED lights and a clock display. The characteristics of the hood are therefore suitable for the top of the category, say the least.

The installation is as simple as installing most high-end microwaves, although it's worth noting that a 58-pound Kitchen Hub stand Attach to the studs behind your wall and may require removal or drilling of the backsplash tiles, depending on their location. .

Smart home controls

Before delving into the specifics of the smart home of this device, we must categorize what exactly is the Kitchen Hub. This is not a smart screen, that is to say it lacks the voice interface that you will find in products such as Google Nest Hub, Amazon Echo Show, and Lenovo Smart Displays. Instead, it uses the Android Oreo phone's operating system, currently version 8.1.0, which scales well on the 27-inch display.

If you've seen the different smart screens and think "why not buy a tablet," the Kitchen Hub clearly highlights the trade-offs between a voice-controlled smart screen and a touch pad.

The Kitchen Hub features information as you'll see it on your Android phone or on a smaller tablet. This assumes that you will mainly use it as a touch screen, with all the tapping and sweeping that entails. Voice input is a secondary feature of the Kitchen Hub, which means that it's not always as responsive or intuitive as its voice-centered smart display cousins.

The Kitchen Hub works with Google Assistant and is preloaded with Google's suite of apps. It responds to "Hey, Google" commands, though the microphone performance in my tests was not as good at hearing or understanding my controls as the smart counter displays we reviewed.

The Kitchen Hub also comes with U Plus Connect, GE's smart home platform. It supports voice control for Nest, Philips Hue and GE Appliances. From GE's point of view, the idea is that U Plus Connect is a central hub for controlling GE's large smart appliance collection, allowing you to start the dishwasher, suspend or extend a drying cycle, or to preheat your oven. For any other smart home product, you will need something else.

That's where the advantage of an Android tablet comes in. The Kitchen Hub comes with the Google Play Store. So you can download any Android compatible application, including those for Amazon Alexa, Ring security cameras or smart locks from the month of August.

A simpler solution than downloading all these individual apps is to download the Google Home app, connect your account and control all your smart home products from the Home app, as you would with your phone.

Cooking with cameras

One of the marketing highlights of Kitchen Hub is its pair of cameras for photos, video calls and social sharing, but these two cameras have left me uncomfortable.

The front camera is mounted at the top of the Kitchen Hub, a sensible and expected place for the camera. As I am 5 feet 4 inches tall, the camera is much higher than the eye level for me, putting the lower half of my face out of the frame while I stand near the beach.

The wide frame of the camera works well to capture what's happening throughout the room and keep you within sight when you move into the kitchen. Nevertheless, these close-ups are not the best for video calling when standing in front of your oven.

The camera mounted under the camera allows you to capture images and videos from your cooktop so you can share what you are working on. It's a great concept. In an increasingly social and shareable smart kitchen, it's handy to be able to get images and videos on an overhead projector without using your phone.