Whirlpool is running a giveaway during CES this year. Each day of CES one kitchen appliance will be given away. All you have to do to enter is fill out an entry form at their website, and you can do so once each day. So go enter, and good luck!

(You might want to check out their products along the way, there’s some very interesting things coming from Whirlpool!)

Interesting Whirlpool News from CES

CoolVox™: Bring entertainment into the kitchen with the CoolVox™ refrigerator concept. Enabled by Bluetooth® wireless technology, the CoolVox™ refrigerator lets users play music through the refrigerator directly from an app on smart- or Bluetooth®- enabled devices. Now consumers can listen to instructional “How to Cook” podcasts directly through the refrigerator, play fun/entertaining music while cooking with the kids and even throw a dinner party and assign specific playlists to each course.

CoolVox™ sounds like a lot of fun. Music goes well with cooking, much better than LCD screens do. I’d rather it were over WIFI than Bluetooth though.

6th Sense Live™: Whirlpool brand continues its leadership in sustainability with the launch of 6th Sense Live technology, the company’s line of smart appliances. On sale in March, 6th Sense Live technology allows users to always be connected. And with that peace of mind, they’re free to focus on whatever else they want or need to do. Features like Smart Assistant, Smart Stats, Smart Nudges and Smart Alerts enable remote functionality and provide status updates, so users can be confident appliances are running smoothly at home. And by connecting to the Smart Grid used by select utility companies, these appliances optimize energy usage and track how much energy is being used.

I think this is the year my kitchen becomes officially smarter than I am. Everything is “Smart” these days. Though in the case of tracking how much energy is being used by appliances that certainly qualifies for the term in my book!

Whirlpool 20/20 also brings the brand’s onsite presence to the virtual community. With updates from the show floor, including photos, videos and blogs, those at home can get a glimpse into the goings-on at CES via ces.whirlpool.com Visitors will also have the chance to win appliances from Whirlpool brand’s Ice Collection, which offers a signature design that enhances and simplifies the way people use their appliances. One appliance will be given away each day of CES, and consumers can enter by filling out a short entry form at ces.whirlpool.com.

Giveaways are always fun. I’m going to go enter now, wish me luck!

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Samsung T9000 RF32FSQDBSR

To LCD or Not to LCD?

Reported by FridgeDimensions Editorial Team on January 8, 2013

4.8

Samsung’s new T9000 French Door refrigerator showed at the International Consumer Electronics Show yesterday. Here at Fridge Dimensions we are always on the lookout for new feature packed and innovative refrigerators, but has Samsung gone too far this time?

Contents:

• Consumer Electronics Show
• T9000 Features
• Conclusion: I was Hoping for Less

The Wonderful, The Weird, The WTF?

Samsung has been making a lot of waves at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year. They have a wide range of products from handheld electronic devices all the way up to home appliances. That refrigerator portion of the latter category is what we focus on here of course, and the Samsung T9000 looks to be one of the more interesting refrigerators to have come around in a while.

CES is always great for some awe-inspiring products, as well as quite a few laughs. I find the more mundane an item generally is thought to be, the worse it becomes at these types of technology shows. You can’t really fault high-end electronics gadgets from adopting the latest technology. But when you start seeing WIFI enabled sneakers or other absurd and useless gadgets, you have to ask yourself, “Why?”

Here is a press release leading into CES from Samsung:

LAS VEGAS – January 7, 2013 – Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. announced today its expanded line-up of premium home appliances for the kitchen at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) from January 8-11, 2013. Samsung, the company that revolutionized the home appliance category with the four-door refrigerator and a freestanding range with the FlexDuo oven, is once again redefining the appliance experience in the kitchen with new refrigerator and range form factors that bring unmatched ease of use, convenience, organization and style to the kitchen.

“As America’s fastest growing appliance brand, Samsung’s award-winning products deliver the flexibility that busy families not only need in the kitchen, but also want,” said Kevin Dexter, senior vice president of home appliances sales and marketing, Samsung Electronics America. “From our latest four-door refrigerator with unsurpassed fresh food storage, to appliances that open a host of new cooking possibilities, this year’s kitchen line from Samsung will make entertaining at home easier and more fun.”

Obviously the press release is a bit promotional in nature, but perhaps in the case of the T9000 refrigerator it’s well deserved. Then again, this is a home appliance at CES, and so there’s sure to be some questionably useful gimics involved.

What Makes Samsung’s T9000 So Interesting?

The Home Entertainer’s Ultimate Refrigerator

The 32 cu. ft. capacity Samsung T9000 Four-Door Refrigerator represents the next evolution in refrigerator design, with a new form factor that delivers the most fresh food storage in its class. This sleek refrigerator features a 19.4 cu. ft. capacity French Door refrigerator compartment on top, and a 6.1 cu. ft. compartment on the lower right side, providing an extraordinary 25.5 cu. ft. of fresh food storage. The lower right compartment can also be used as a freezer if desired, and is complemented by a 6.1 cu. ft. freezer on the left side in this unique and versatile design. Imagine the possibilities of using the lower right side compartment as a kid zone, as a prep zone for a special meal, as a centralized storage area for a family member with dietary restrictions, or to replace a separate beverage refrigerator.

The lower right compartment sounds like one of the more interesting innovations in refrigerators we’ve seen in a while. In my family we’ve alway stocked up the freezer once or twice a month, and then gradually freezer space empties while fresh food space fills up with left-overs. Having a compartment which can serve either purpose would really help balance things out to ensure you always are making the most of your refrigerator’s capacity.

Imagine being able to store all that extra frozen food right up until Thanksgiving, cooking it, and then being able to store it in the fridge as left-overs! Samsung is brilliant!

In addition to being flexible and stunningly beautiful, this refrigerator also performs. To help ensure optimal temperature and humidity control, as well as performance in each of the fresh food zones, the T9000 has Samsung’s Triple Cooling system. This unique cooling technology ensures that commercial grade humidity levels are maintained in the fresh food compartments with the help of two compressors, three evaporators and an array of sensors to keep produce fresher longer.

That’s a lot of cooling power and control. Hopefully it’s energy efficient as well, but we’ll have to wait and see.

How To Mess Up the Perfect Refrigerator

Finally, only at CES in the Samsung booth, the T9000 LCD is on display, featuring apps to help families stay organized and connected in the kitchen. In particular, the T9000 LCD includes the Evernote app, which allows consumers to share photos, videos, and even recipes with family and friends. The T9000 LCD also includes calendar and weather apps, and more.

And here is where Samsung loses me. Yes, a 10″ display on a refrigerator sounds cool and is going to generate some hype at CES … but you know what is cooler? A 10″ display that has more functionality and isn’t tied to a 7′ x 3′ x 3′ (est) 300 lbs anchor. These are called tablet PCs. They’re great, you can take them anywhere you want. You can pick one up (+ refrigerator) for much less than the T9000 is going to cost.

Not only is the LCD a questionably useful gimic, but it’s possible that it’s going to negatively impact the useability of the appliance. Imagine trying to cook dinner while the kids are playing Angry Birds on your refrigerator. Then of course there’s the energy efficiency you’ll achieve when the freezer drawer is extended for hours at a time as a make-shift seat for their gaming experience. The more I think of it, the worse this feature gets.

This is why we have living/family/rec rooms, to keep the couch zombies and hyper-active from blocking hallways and kitchen cabinets. (Do we still have rec rooms? I know we had them growing up but I haven’t heard the term in a while … If we still have rec rooms I want a food disposal integrated with my foosball table! Then when I lose all the balls we can just use Cheeto Balls, Crunch Berries, or hard boiled quail eggs. Cleanup will be a snap with my FoodsballTable™!)

The Samsung T9000 Four-Door Refrigerator (Model: RF32FSQDBSR) will be available in late Spring 2013 for an MSRP of $3,999.

The $3999 price point seems reasonable for a refrigerator with all these features. Even though it will surely be available for a lower street price, the Samsung T9000 is still rather disappointing in that such a useful feature as the fridge/feezer adaptable compartment will be stuck with such a price-tag inflating gimic as the Android LCD display. I hope that Samsung offers their adaptable compartment on lower-end models so that that convenience can be more affordable to the average consumer.

So what do you think about Samsung’s new refrigerator? Let us know in the comments below …

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An Ace Score is the overall creative effectiveness score for an individual TV commercial. It is based on two key measures: Persuasion and Watchability. The Persuasion rating is based on the interactivity of six data elements – Desire, Relevance, Likeability, Attention, Information and Change – automatically captured and analyzed for each ad. Watchability measures the engagement that a person has with the ad. Watchability and Persuasion interact to create the Ace Score.

For 2012, Ace Metrix found that the top 2 most influential ad spots were from appliance brands and featured refrigerators.

Second Most Influential Commercial

Frigidaire came in at number two for their “History of Innovation” commercial. The spot leads in with the first electric refrigerator from Frigidaire, and then highlights other innovations Frigidaire appliances have featured over the years, including the OrbitClean™ wash arm in their new line of dishwashers. The Frigidaire commercial received an ACE ranking of 691 out of 950, and first hit the airwaves on Sept 24, 2012.

Big Refrigerators are Best!

Samsung took the top spot for it’s commercial about their new large capacity French Door refrigerators titled “For Your Big Life”. This cool commercial that first aired on May 6, 2012 garnered a rating of 697 out of 950.

It would seem that refrigerators were really on people’s minds in 2012. We at FridgeDimensions.com find it comforting that we aren’t the only ones always thinking about these coolest of appliances!

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Many of these refrigerators have been banned in the European Union and so were being sent overseas to places where they were still legal. As many as 2 million such refrigerators had been imported into Ghana in the past.

According to the BBC, today we can strike Ghana from that list as officials there have taken a stand against the use of second-hand refrigerators that have been imported into their country. This appears to be a ban on imported refrigerators, not ones already in the country.

While it’s understandable that people would want to use cheap second-hand refrigerators, over the long run the energy costs are likely to eat up much of, or even surpass that savings. Ghana is furthering incentives towards the use of new efficient refrigerators by offering rebates for those who trade-in older refrigerators when making a new refrigerator purchase.

We at FridgeDimensions.com applaud Ghana for doing the right thing both in banning the importation of old refrigerators, as well as offering incentives to further ensure more ecologically friendly refrigerators will fill the void. Perhaps countries which are major exporters of these second-hand refrigerators would do well to consider incentives towards the proper disposal of banned refrigerators.

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Hamburg, Germany has the Coolest Building!

Here at FridgeDimensions we have a soft spot in our hearts for anything chilly, and what could be cooler than an igloo made of refrigerators? So we salute Ralf Schmerberg’s newest brain-child. It’s an igloo comprised of 322 second-hand refrigerators.

This cool structure has been erected in Hamburg, Germany to help illustrate just how much electricity the modern person uses. The inner part of the igloo houses a bunch of gadgets and toys, all driven by electricity. A meter outside keeps track of the overall electric usage.

We spend a lot of time looking at the energy efficiency of refrigerators, so this project is especially interesting to us. Upgrading an older refrigerator not only can make your kitchen look and function a lot better, but it can lower your electrical bills as well. Sometimes when coupled with rebates for turning in your old fridge, the savings over time can actually be enough to pay for the new refrigerator.

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