The 10 strangest new home gadgets
Looking for a robot to spy on your kids while you're at work? Or, are you sick of mushy cereal or bowls that aren't edible? Then these are the newest home gadgets for you.
A number of kooky new products debuted this week at the 2014 International Home and Housewares Show in Chicago. Some could potentially be useful, such as the scissors attached to your wall; others could be fun, such as the ice cream maker kickball; and a few may just leave you scratching your head.
Soft-Shell Ice Cream Ball
The $35 ice cream ball from YayLabs may look just like a kickball, but actually, it's a kickball that makes ice cream. Fill it with ice and rock salt on one side and ice cream ingredients on the other and hit the backyard. Kick this ball around for about 20 minutes and you'll have either a pint or a quart of ice cream. It's due out later this summer.
Graviti Plus pepper mill
Pepper mills were very popular at this year's show. Brightly-colored, massively-sized, sleek and modern--these things turned up at nearly every kitchenware booth on the floor. But the most striking may be the $50 Trudeau Plus pepper mill. It not only grinds pepper for you--in case that simple twisting motion is too much for your hand--but it does so automatically as soon as you tip it upside down. No more two-handed pepper grinding for you, as long as you supply this thing with a whopping six AAA batteries.
Creature Cups
A little creature is waiting at the bottom of these $14 Creature Cups to freak you out when you finish your coffee. Spiders, octopi, dinosaurs, monkeys, bunnies and owls pop up from inside your plain mug, after lurking inside your drink.
Perfect Bacon Bowl
Obol Crispy Bowl
The $15 Obol Crispy Bowl is a cereal bowl for the discerning cereal eater, one that loves cereal but can't stand when it gets mushy after sitting in milk for a while. According to the company, that's 90 percent of cereal-eaters. So the bowl has one elevated compartment for cereal and another for milk, keeping the two separate until you "swoop" the cereal up and "scoop" it into the milk. As a bonus, the design has a slot on the bottom to put your hand so it's easier to hold one-handed while chowing down.
The Famibot
The Famibot is a small robot that you can leave at home to nag your kids while you're out. From your cell phone, you can drive it around your house and its camera can survey what's happening and take pictures. You can also speak through it and in turn, hear what's going on around the robot. It purifies the air, plays music, turns on and off lights and certain appliances, and offers a few safety features such as a smoke detector and infrared sensors that detect if someone has broken into your home. The little robot will debut sometime this summer and cost anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 to start.
Cup of Noodles microwave cooker
Cooking prepackaged noodles in a Styrofoam cup just got a whole lot easier, or more complicated, depending on how you look at it. The Cup of Noodles microwave cooker is basically a microwavable tea kettle. You heat water in it, then pour that water into the Cup of Noodles or Ramen. Then you pack that flimsy Styrofoam cup back into the emptied plastic tea kettle, secure the lid and you're on your way. The Good Cook product is coming out in July and it'll run $5, or roughly the price of five Cups of Noodles.
Wizor Wall Scissors
The Wizor wall scissors may sound frightening at first, but the device, in fact, looks quite harmless -- like a plastic hook for hanging clothes, not scissors jutting out of the wall. Take a tag or some thread and just swipe it down, across the nearly-hidden blade and you've effectively got a pair of scissors. But try cutting open a bag or a piece of paper and things may get a bit more complicated. You can buy a pack of two for $9.
The Dipr
In the long list of unnecessary items at the show designed for the lazy bones in all of us, the Dipr may take top billing. The $2.99 Dipr is basically a replacement for your fingers when you really want to dip a cookie in milk but don't want to get your fingers wet and simultaneously can't stand the idea of even one small piece of your cookie going into your mouth without being coated in cold milk. But don't think this is a universal cookie dipper, it's designed specifically for sandwich cookies like Oreos. For chocolate chip cookies, you're on your own.
Dualit Sandwich Cage
Dualit is a high-end, expensive English toaster. Selling for more than $200 each, these toasters mean business. For that kind of money, you'd expect to be able to make a whole sandwich in there, and luckily, you can. Enter the $25 sandwich cage, which squeezes your sandwich together so you can actually cook it in a toaster. These toasters are apparently so easy to clean, that you can throw any number of melted, gooey ingredients in and though they may drip, they can be easily cleaned by removing a tray on the bottom.