Part of the fun of being a tech journalist is the frequent opportunity to try out gadgets and devices that I would probably get nowhere near for budgetary reasons in my regular life. Case in point: I recently got my hands on an Ember Travel Mug 2 from the T3 office, and have been seeing how it fits into normal life.
The pitch seems cool – Ember has taken its temperature-maintaining tech from a desktop setting and integrated it into a flask design that can be more easily travelled with, without spills. What I’ve found, though, has made me question all of that.
Put short, sometimes a device doesn’t actually need to be as fancy as it is – and a travel flask turns out to be a great example. Ember’s sales patter for the Travel Mug 2 leans on the flask’s ability to keep your drinks at exactly your desired temperature for up to three hours before its battery runs low.
That means you could have a hot drink at the end of a nice three-hour hike, but if you use it at your desk (like a regular Ember mug, on which more later), you could also use the included charging coaster to keep the drink hot indefinitely. Again, sounds great, right?
Well, maybe – but if you’ve ever taken a normal insulated flask on a hike or in the car, you’re probably already wondering what makes Ember’s flask so much better than the £10 version you could get literally anywhere. The short answer, in my view, is that it really isn’t all that superior, and at a staggering £200 it looks like a pretty tall order.
My partner drinks a whole heap of tea every day, and she used the Ember flask a few days running before coming to the same conclusion – it was a lot of admin to keep a drink hot when we’ve long had flasks that do the same for hours and hours, many of which are more leak-proof to boot (since Ember only calls its lid “spill-proof”).
Ember’s business started simple, offering heated mugs for your desktop, and that idea always made sense to me, even at a steep price. No more cooled cups of tea or coffee, and no hassle to use a powered coaster instead of a regular one.
The moment the mug becomes untethered from its coaster, like this flask, though, it becomes a question of battery life, and Ember simply hasn’t solved that problem adequately. Three hours might be the result of some impressive engineering, but it doesn’t really make enough of a difference compared to traditional flasks.
In about a week’s time we’ll be driving from Edinburgh to London as part of a fairly complicated house move, and the Ember Travel Mug 2 will get one last chance to impress us, in exactly the circumstances it was designed for. Still, even if it does outperform a normal travel flask on that morning, I’m leery of its price tag.
There’s no downside to app connections, Apple Find My integration, and fine temperature control, but I’m just not sure that anyone actually needs them in a travel flask!
