Auto Tea is not a drive through tea shop (sadly)

While doing the mindless mall-shuffle the other day, I came across the Teavana store. Gadgetboxers know that I prefer the leaf to the bean (if you know what I mean , eh? eh?), so I was intrigued to see their Auto Tea machine—it’s kind of like a coffee maker, but for tea.

To be fair, in my day we called a device like this a teapot , but the Auto Tea takes some of the manual labor out of the process by steeping the tea for a desired amount of time (between 2 and 12 minutes), and then keeping it warm, without even the need for a tea cozy or the emasculating side-effects of owning one.

Unfortunately, unless it really catches on, we probably won’t ever see the Auto Tea coming to feature parity with the coffee makers of the world—that means no automatic timers and no weather functionality. Blast.