Well, it turns out the digital interface sucks. Let's say you want to bake a grilled cheese sandwich for five minutes. You have to press 32 buttons. Yep, there are 32 button presses to get one grilled cheese sandwich. Because the baking option defaults to 30 minutes, you need to hit the Time button 25 times to get it down to five minutes. Then there are another 7 button presses to initiate the time, tell it to bake, tell it to start, and so forth.

This morning, I tried to make some of those yummy orange Pillsbury danish that come in a tube. It took 19 button presses to bake it for 18 minutes. The dough was still white and pasty on top, so I put it in for another five minutes (32 more button presses). Still pasty, another five minutes (yet another 32 more button presses). All told, I had to press the little buttons 83 times, just to bake an instant danish breakfast!

No, you can't just hold the button and let it count down. Yeah, that would have been nice. And, of course, you can't change the 30 minute default to anything else.

Oh, and because the interface is digital, when you toast something, you get three settings. That's it. There's no analog adjustment if the toaster isn't quite right. You get uncooked, still uncooked, and toasting for 19 minutes and your bread is burnt.

Strike three: crappy cooking
And that brings us to the third strike. If the oven was dangerous and the interface sucked, but it created amazing food, it'd almost be worth the risk. But it doesn't.

As I mentioned, I had to put the danish back in the oven for an extra ten minutes, until the top turned a more golden brown. Unfortunately, while the top cooked very slowly, the bottom burned.

I've made these danish a whole lot of times in the ancient toaster oven I was replacing, and I never, ever got burning on the bottom and raw dough on top. I'm not much of a cook, but just how hard is it to heat something for 18 minutes?

Final conclusions
So, why am I writing about this in Computing Unplugged? Is it just because I'm pissed that the bloody thing burned my hand?

No. I'm writing because this is just the sort of gadget we gadget-freaks are likely to buy. If you're faced with fifteen toasters and one has a digital display, that's the one you're going to choose. Right? Yeah, admit it.

Given that this thing is in Wal-Mart and given that it's the sort of thing our readers are likely to buy, it seemed only prudent to pass along a warning. Don't buy this thing.

And, if you're the guy who designed this digital-displaying turd of an oven, I sentence you to use the GE Halogen toaster oven from Hell, every day before coffee, for the rest of your natural life. It's your design. You live with it. Me, I'm taking it back. This is why Wal-Mart has a 90-day return policy.

We give the GE Halogen toaster oven a rating of zero golden-brown danish out of five.

OUR RATING: 0 of 5

Heather Wardell received her first Palm handheld in 1997 (from a boss who couldn't get the hang of Graffiti) and has never looked back. She worked in banking as a systems analyst for four years, and then moved into elementary education, teaching computers at a private elementary school for four years. Heather is now a full-time writer with two main specialties: articles that explain how a particular technology works, and short stories that usually involve technology run amok. You can reach her on the Web at http://www.heatherwardell.com.