I get annoyed when an electronic gadget has functions that you can only access through the remote control, so I am not a candidate to buy the Mr. Coffee Smart Optimal Brew. It’s a very nice new network-connected drip coffee machine that you can program remotely from your smartphone. The problem: you can only program it from your smartphone.

If you’re heading to bed and want to set the machine to start brewing at 7:30 tomorrow morning, you’re going to have to whip out your phone. The trade-off for having a smart coffeemaker is that you end up with a coffeemaker that’s too smart for its own good: it doesn’t have the capability to let a user who is sitting in front of the machine program it using, you know, buttons on the coffemaker.

The same machine has a non-smart cousin, which our own caffeinated colleagues down the hall at Consumer Reports reviewed and thought was pretty great. It costs $50 less than the smart version, with the bonus feature that you do not need to have a smartphone to program it. You can program it the old-fashioned way, by setting the clock the night before. Or by pressing “brew” if the power went out overnight and the machine is stuck at permanent midnight. We guess.

Mr. Coffee gets smart but in a goofy way [Consumer Reports]

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