MEATER Plus - Smart Meat Thermometer

An update (April 2022) to my original review. My original post can be seen at the end. Purchased again in April of this year and the experience is much better but still needs a ton of work. This is now the 3rd time I am purchasing this product, but only 2nd time I'm actually getting to successfully use it. What I love: - The Ambient temperature sensor. This feature is crucial if you are serious about smoking / BBQ. The built-in thermometers on most grills and offset smokers are usually very poor quality, and give skewed readings. Because they are connected to the metal of the grill, and because they are located at the top of the cooking chamber they tend to read much hotter than the air/environment where your food is actually being cooked. The fact that I only need 1 probe to read both internal and ambient temperature is fantastic. What needs work? The bamboo/wooden charging case feels premium, but there's no real way to clean it. And if that thermometer isn't 100% dry when you put it back, that's just a breeding ground for mold. A major design flaw to this charging case is the fact that it doesn't have any indication of whether or not the probe is charging. Now, this may not seem like a huge deal at first, but then I ran into the same issue I had with the first unit I purchased. The first use, it works great. However, after cleaning it (I thought thoroughly enough but was proven wrong) I stored the probe back in the charging case, expecting it to be charged the next time I needed to use it. Now, a delay of needing to wait to charge this probe for a few hours can delay a BBQ project by an entire day. I woke up at 6 am this morning to start an all-day smoke to find that the probe would not power on no matter what I tried. Turned out, the probe never was charging. After contacting customer support and finding some helpful tips on Reddit, I found that even if the back charging plate looks clean, it often isn't clean enough to make a connection with the charger. The support recommended using baking soda and a coarse sponge (which I did the first 2 times I tried cleaning it). I ended up finding a post on Reddit suggesting I use fine-grit sandpaper to fully clean the back tip of the probe to ensure it would charge properly. After trying this, thankfully it was finally charging. BUT I had no way of actually knowing whether or not the probe was charging until a few hours later when I took it off the charger. I'm hoping in a future version they add a charging indicator to the case. The software has definitely improved by leaps and bounds from my first review, but still needs a ton of work. Originally, it was incredibly difficult to remove/reset a device if you were having issues. Now, it's possible but I found that the menus were sending me in circles. Since I first tried the product, the functionality of the "estimated cooking time remaining" has never worked. When the Meater+ works, it's great. But it's too inconsistent. It feels incomplete. ORIGINAL 2021 REVIEW: I was so excited about this! I had seen it on youtube and bought it immediately. It seems like a great idea, but executed poorly. In the app, there is no way to specify which phone/tablet you want to use as a base station, and which one you want to have as the "remote" device. I was leaving my iPad out by the grill, and bringing my phone inside with me so I could view the temperature from inside. But the thermometer kept defaulting to try and connect to my phone instead of the iPad that was less than 5 feet away. There is no easy way to connect a second device to the app, or to factory reset one. After one use, the thermometer would not charge or connect to any device. It just died after one use. The one time it did work, it worked fantastically (if I was close enough). I think the app UI needs some rethinking. I really wanted to keep using this, but it died after one use. When I tried to order a replacement, my order was lost, and took a few weeks to fix the issue. I don't even want to try again. Best Buy has another brand of smart thermometer and I think I will end up trying that one instead.