September 4, 2007 One of the first kitchen appliances to have an integrated LCD was LG’s much celebrated refrigerator which began show appearances seven years ago and though it was a star in its day and is still around in a subsequent design, it still strikes us as something for people with more money than tech savvy. At IFA in Berlin, the Holland Electro Wave TV made its first appearance. The Wave is the work of a dutch designer Marcel Wanders who has designed a whole range of kitchen appliances for the Dutch consumer electronics company. While the product in the press handouts looks impressive, HE showed what appeared to be a prototype at IFA and quite frankly, they shouldn’t have because it looked like exactly what it is – two different consumer electronics products bolted together. Convergence is happening, but the only problem with fusing two quite different CE products together is that you’ll find one of them out of date before the other. Whatsmore, for EUR500 (US$680) you can buy two different products that aren’t joined at the hip and do the same jobs – and you’ll be able to take your portable media player a whole bunch of places other than the kitchen.

The Wave is a 23 litre microwave oven with an integrated TFT screen and DVD player in the door, so you can watch the teev or a movie while your microwave cooks a meal for you. It may suit some people to have a teev on their microwave but we suspect the market is small and the poor finish on the products we saw at the show, it’s a dumb idea to ti

Microwave Specs

• Microwave • Power max 900watt • 9 Automatic cooking programs Television Specs

• TFT 10,2’’ high grade picture screen. • Pixel: 640 (H) x RGB x 480 (V) = 921600 (dots) • Screensavers. DVD--player Specs

• DVD Progressive scan Y Pb Pr component output. • Built in decoder with 5.1 audio channel output • Support digital audio coaxial output and optical output. • Supports DVD/DIVX, SVCD, VCD, DVCD, CD, HDCD, MP3, MP4, Picture-CD, CD-R, CD-RW • Support multi-language, multi-camera angle • Intelligent software upgrade. • Reading: SD, MMC, MS CARD and USB