I little while ago I was moaning on the Internet (shocked you are, I’m sure) about how I keep leaving half drunk cold cups of tea/coffee everywhere…anyway, somebody took some pity on me and told me they were sending me a little gift. What turns up but an Ember Heated Coffee Mug in stainless steel.
When I took this out of the box I couldn’t work out whether I thought this was the stupidest idea since the invention of stupid ideas, or whether it was going to be the best thing ever. That’s not something that often happens to me and tech, I usually know pretty quickly how I’m going to feel about something.
Fundamentally, all this thing does is allow you to set a temperature for your drink, and the mug will keep the drink at that temperature. For example, I like tea/coffee at about 57/58 Celsius. I connect the mug to my phone, use the app to set the temperature to the one I like, and then fill it with my drink. If the drink is less than the temperature I want, it heats it up. If it’s hotter, it lets it cool until it hits that temperature, and then it maintains it at that temperature. All rechargeable battery powered by a funky desk charger (more on that shortly).
So, either the stupidest thing ever, or brilliant. Which is it? We’ll get to that.
Does it work? Fundamentally, absolutely yes. If I make say a mug of tea it’ll keep it around 57 degree for a good 90 to 120 minutes, which is more than enough time for me to find it cold four hours later, but to get the odd hot mouthful along the way. From that perspective it works really well.
Let’s get back to those charging pads – they are not standard wireless charging pads – they’re unique to the Ember mugs. From a low charge the units take about 2 to 2.5 hours to fully charge – that’s quite a long time, however I found it’s never a problem as I tend to top them up as and when I’m using them – I.e., there’s a pad on my desk that I tend to use. In addition, whereas are you going to keep it other than on its charging pad?
The stainless steel looks good too – it’s a very nice finish and very easy to keep clean. It’s not however very big at 295ml in volume.
So was it the stupidest thing in the history of stupid or…? Well, given that 295ml was a little small for me I now have another one, bought with my own money. This one is in black and is a larger 414ml volume unit, rather than 295ml so some 40% larger by volume. So yeah, I’ve learned to really like the thing, and I absolutely must do to have spent 150 GREAT BRITISH EARTH POUNDS on one. Yeah. They’re expensive – real expensive.
They do however fulfil their function, and they do it well.
It’s not all joyous however, there are some things that bothered me – and I’ve managed to resolve most of them. So let’s look at those annoyances.
The Charging Pad Uses a Barrel Connector
Why for the love of everything USBC-C is the charging pad provided with a plug with a barrel connector. That’s really, really annoying. I don’t want to be carrying another plug about if I don’t need to, or having to plug something it for some non-standard device. Boo Ember, BOOOO. Saying that, I did find a solution – and it cost me a fiver. The solution is a Type C USB-C Female Input to DC 5.5 * 2.1mm Power PD Charge Cable fit for Laptop 18-20V from Amazon. This cable has USB-C on one end, and the correct barrel connector on the other. A little caveat however – I had to trim down the plastic sheathing on the barrel connector to allow it to fit properly on the charging pad. Once I’d done that, it works fine.
Some other observations with charging. It must be connected to a USB-C PD port. Interestingly, from a consumption point of view, you’ll see the unit peak at about 30-35w charging for a few minutes, before dropping back to circa 2-10 watts during the charge. It then seems to short-burst charge rather than constant trickle – that’s a bit odd. It’s a shame it’s so low as that’s why it takes so long to charge – although like I say, I’ve not noticed it being a problem, and I’ve rarely found it without charge.
A lid!
I don’t like having open tea/coffee mugs sitting about, they’re too easy to spill and I always have tech stuff about. Nobody wants to be in an episode of Chris Shaw and the Drowned Laptop. The units are fairly base heavy – the 295ml unit is about 400grams, with the 414ml one about 457grams – but they’re still full of liquid.
Fortunately however you can get lids – just be careful that you get the right lid for the right mug size!
295ml Ember Stainless Steel Lid
Each is another 15GBP of course – the price of being into consumer tech can be uncomfortable.
The App
Ah, the app. Now initially this went pretty well. Setup was easy, it found the mug, it did a firmware update (on a mug – what a time to be alive). Admittedly I didn’t need to use the app very often. I have the same temperature for tea & coffee, so I set it, and forget it. The only time I need to use the app is to change the temperature or if I’m curious about the charge state.
Then, I imagine the Ember Software Development Team spent a little too long attending classes on Software Design run by Sonos. For a few months the app was buggy, and a huge pain in the backside. It would often lose your config requiring you to login in again, or lose the mug completely requiring a complete reset, or completely ignoring whatever you set in the app etc. Yeah, a complete Sonos.
Fortunately they do seem to have resolved that now. The app now (on Android at least, I haven’t really tried it on my iPhone) seems fairly stable and it’s rare I have a problem with it.
Summary
So should you buy one? Absolutely not, unless you like the idea and the amount of money involved won’t stop you paying your mortgage. If that’s the case, get one immediately. I think they’re ace! I’d be bit wary of the Ember travel mug however. My travels around the various Reddit forums seem to indicate those units are not well liked – although to be fair here this is an anecdote not based on any real data.
They’re now in regular use in my house, and I rarely have a drink in anything else. I have several drink mugs – things like the Yeti Mug – and while they’d good, they offer a different problem. Often with those the drinks are still too hot for quite a while after you’ve made them! With the Ember they seem to cool at a reasonable rate, they just maintain the temperature you set.
I do wonder how long the battery will last (in terms of lifetime resilience), but again I’ve no real data on that. Would I be happy if they lasted say 3 years? I’d hope to get longer, but I’d imagine that’s a reasonable timescale for them.
Anyway, if this is coming across as a confused tech review, it’s because I’m slightly confused by the product. Love what it does, don’t like the barrel charger, and more importantly the stupid cost.
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