The Breville Oracle Jet Coffee-Maker
Indulge in Australian coffee culture, without having to actually visit
When the Internet was young and there was about one tech-product launch a week, as opposed to the hundreds that happen now, your columnist decided to set up a service to help technology companies make their offerings more user-friendly.
Whether because of stupidity or smartness, I was able to find elementary faults in both gadgets and Web sites within minutes. The business was called the Village Idiot—the idea being that I would test your product as the world’s dumbest customer and find everything that’s wrong.
It didn’t get off the ground because I was advised repeatedly that tech companies would rather push on with a flawed product than admit something’s wrong. But I have continued to enjoy watching tech businesses “iterate,” at their own pace, taking years to identify problems that were obvious to normal people after a few seconds. And as they fix the last round of mistakes, inevitably they introduce entirely new ones.
Don’t misunderstand—kitchen appliances and, specifically, coffee machines by the nearly century-old Australian company Breville (known as Sage in some markets) are sensationally good. The brushed-stainless-steel look, the build quality, and, yes, the coffee are all unbeatable.
This writer got a bean-to-cup Breville Oracle Touch machine (now being phased out in many countries) in March 2020, and it’s only now in need of its first servicing.
Magnificent as it is, it has a few subtle flaws. The lack of a sensor to tell you when the bean hopper is running low always catches you out. Mischievously, it seems to know just when you don’t have a handy bag of beans to re-fill it with. The cover you lift to pour in water locks permanently closed, requiring you to pull the whole caboodle out every couple of days to fill the tank from the back. The machine also takes a while to get up to temperature when you switch it on.
The brand-new Breville Oracle Jet is slightly smaller and even more refined than the Oracle Touch. It is ready to work in three seconds—a huge improvement. The water-cover issue has been fixed. And Breville has improved features you wouldn’t imagine could be improved, such as the milk frother, which has gone from good to amazing.
The Oracle Jet is Web-connected for new software updates and new drink options. In addition to plain old hot-coffee drinks, it already comes programmed to make hot chocolate, tea, and a range of cold-coffee drinks, or “milkshakes,” as coffee snobs call them. (Breville’s market research showed that 75 percent of under-25s buy cold-coffee drinks all year round.)
There are, though, the inevitable un-improvements. The very attractive color screen on AIR MAIL’s sample was insensitive and needed repeated prodding to activate functions. And the on-screen navigation is not yet quite right.
And what about the annoying lack of a coffee-bean-level sensor, I asked one of the Breville executives over from Sydney for the Oracle Jet launch? You’ve fixed that, right? “Oh, man,” the executive replied. “Doesn’t that drive you nuts? And always when you’ve run out of beans, right? I must mention that to the team.”
Tineye
A search-by-image platform that will never let you down
Someone I shall coyly describe as “known to this column” was, when he was single, flirting online with a considerably younger Cuban-American woman in Florida. He accepted an invitation to fly down for a weekend with her at Clearwater Beach and was about to set off to La Guardia Airport when a friend whose boyfriend was an intelligence officer in Australia called him to say, “Don’t on any account meet ‘Sandra.’”
Thousands of miles away, they had done a Google image search and discovered Sandra’s photograph was in fact that of a well-known model in Los Angeles. The Aussie spy’s fear was that Sandra would turn out to be a kidnap gang. He did a little more research for fun and discovered that Sandra was a teenage boy in Nigeria, who had doubtless been finding the WhatsApp putative romance highly amusing.
Google Search by Image is good, and it certainly saved a possible situation in this case, but it’s a little clumsy and very basic compared with the ultimate photograph hunter, TinEye, a free-to-use image search from a tech company in Toronto.
As TinEye admits, Google’s index is actually bigger, but their own matches are much more accurate. This writer has been testing it extensively with everything from works of art to wine-bottle labels. In each case, it quickly shuffled through 69.8 billion images to look for matches and didn’t come back with a single mistake, thereby beating Google by a margin.
TinEye is more of a commercial service than a consumer tool, so it doesn’t have its own fun app, although you can embed their technology in your own app. It’s accordingly easier to use on a computer than a mobile device. But if you’re serious about anything from checking that someone on a dating app is who they say they are to researching the background of a painting, it’s worth your time.
The DJI Avata 2 Drone
The world’s leading drone manufacturer adds V.R. capabilities
It’s been only 11 years since the then 7-year-old Chinese company DJI produced its first consumer drone, the Phantom 1. It was a revelation, with automated stability software that made it possible for even a complete rookie to fly a drone and hover stably in windy conditions.
Drone-flying, which was previously the province of skilled professional operators, was suddenly huge fun. And so popular was photography with the onboard cameras that DJI would soon cleverly refer to its products as “flying cameras.”
Under its shy founder, Frank Wang, DJI was a huge success. The company, now partly owned by the Chinese state, has 14,000 employees around the world, produces consumer and professional products ranging from camera systems and gimbal stabilizers to aerial agriculture equipment, and has some 76 percent of the world’s consumer-drone market. DJI also owns the Swedish Über-camera-maker Hasselblad. Movie, TV, and music companies all over the world use DJI drones for filming, as do police and military forces.
To emphasize how popular drone-flying has become, DJI now has glossy consumer stores across the world, with shops on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and on Regent Street in London, to name but two.
This new DJI, the Avata 2, is a particular delight. Combine it with some DJI accessories (the RC Motion 3 and Goggles 3) and you can not only fly in First Person View, as if you were aboard the drone, but you can pilot the craft intuitively by moving your head and wrist rather than twiddling joysticks on a remote control. You effectively become your own soaring, swooping seagull. The Avata 2 also shoots super-wide 4K video footage and high-quality stills.
The Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 Earbuds
A pair of earbuds that does Bluetooth one better
Some people are wryly amused by the number of headphones and earphones that find their way into Landing Gear, in most cases welcomed by your columnist as the best he’s heard to date.
Yet it’s true: these products just get better and better. One that sounded fantastic five years ago sounds like mud today. When, in 1979, I tried the first portable personal stereo—the pioneering Sony Walkman, with its thin over-ear headphones capped in orange plastic foam—the audio quality seemed magically vivid, almost impossibly so. That antique rig, which is worth thousands now, would doubtless sound worse than mud 45 years on.
The British hi-fi company Bowers & Wilkins has just released a “true wireless” in-ear device, the Pi8, which by my estimation is the best on the market to date. I’ve reviewed other earphones this past year (the Status Between 3ANC, the Final ZE8000 MK2, and others) that were outstanding in different ways, but for overall impact these are the current front-runner.
There’s something interestingly, if geekily, unusual about these, too. While the B&W Pi8 sound superb connected by Bluetooth directly to your phone, tablet, or laptop, they boast another wireless mode said by B&W to transmit five times the amount of data. And the enhancement isn’t just technical or outside of the range of human hearing—it’s startlingly obvious when you hook it up.
You do need an up-to-date iPhone or Android or a newish MacBook to experience B&W’s Smartcase mode. If you have such a source, wire it to the Pi8’s case, and the case, rather than the phone’s radio, then becomes the radio transmitter that the earphones connect to. This connection isn’t regular Bluetooth but a version known as aptX Adaptive, which offers quality that probably exceeds that of most of your downloaded or streamed music. In other words, you’ll be hearing the music at the highest quality possible.
At a less technical level, the shiny B&W Pi8s are rather spiffy, too. Take a look at David Beckham modeling them on the Bowers & Wilkins Web site and you may agree.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
