GE Profile UltraFast Smart Air Fry Oven Review: A Clever Wi-Fi-Connected Appliance

Summary

• The UltraFast Smart Air Fry Oven’s smart features lack true functionality beyond adding a modern touch.
• The Wi-Fi connectivity lets you control cooking remotely but with limitations, which can at times feel like it defeats the point of a smart oven.
• The oven gets the basics right and delivers solid cooking performance, even without needing to preheat.

Smart, Wi-Fi-connected countertop ovens are a thin category. I’ve tried several of them. And while the GE Profile UltraFast Smart Air Fry Oven isn’t bursting with tech, it’s forward-looking enough to improve the cooking experience with some modern affordances.

Price and Availability

The GE Profile UltraFast Smart Air Fry Oven is now available for purchase. It retails for $449 but has been on sale for as low as $249. The oven has 11 cooking modes, including baking, toasting, and air frying.

The Lightbar and Fancy Door Mechanism Are Cool, But Not Smart

When the June Oven was discontinued, I started looking for the next truly smart, connected countertop appliance, leading me to the GE Profile UltraFast Oven. Its Wi-Fi connection and mobile app controls certainly put it in contention. Those aspects work fine. Rather, it’s some of its finer details that leave something to be desired.

Regarding the basics, the UltraFast Oven can handle temperatures between 170 and 500 degrees (Fahrenheit). Its cavity size is 0.83 cubic feet, which is enough to fit a full-sized 12-inch pizza. It should also be able to bake a decent-sized bird. Its air-fry ability is front and center for people latching onto the latest cooking trend, but it can still do other things like toast up to six pieces of bread, roast, broil, and cook in other item-specific modes.

One of the first things you’ll notice about this oven is its door mechanism, which lifts it up and over the top with a single push of a button. The wire grate also presents itself on opening, so you don’t have to reach in too far.

While I was impressed with these touches and found them helpful on a daily basis, I wouldn’t call them smart. They’re interesting pieces of engineering, but not smart technology. Be aware, however, the button to unlatch the door is a little loud in a quiet house.

Similarly, the lightbar across the bottom is more clever and neat than it is smart. It will indicate the temperature or time remaining and move from left to right as different buttons are triggered. The biggest downside to this feature is that it might be too subtle. Once you notice it, you’ll appreciate its function. But there’s a chance you write it off at first as just an accent light. It took me a full day or two before I began registering the light as an indicator.

The Wi-Fi Connection Is Purposefully Limited

The crux of the UltraFast Oven’s smartness is its Wi-Fi connection to the SmartHQ app, which is available for iPhone and Android. I got my first preview of the app with the GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker—just one of many appliances from GE that use the same app.

Since the app supports so many products, it’s not overly focused on ovens compared with GE’s various other connected appliances. It’s nice for a customer that they can buy a kitchen’s worth of GE products and control them all in a single app. Its broad approach is magnified, however, when you only use one GE device. Sometimes the app is updated in the App Store for issues or features that have nothing to do with this UltraFast Oven.

The design of the app also suffers a bit with a lack of focus. The interface isn’t offensive enough that you won’t get used to it. It’s just not as well-designed or simplified as June’s interface or even Traeger’s mobile app.

My biggest complaint about the app and the wireless connection, however, is how heavy-handed it is. It can remotely start the oven, but you first need to enable it on the oven itself. It’s a safety precaution that’s too dramatic for my tastes. If you don’t pre-enable the remote capability, then you can only send the cooking style, time, and temperature to the oven, which then needs to be manually started with a press of the button on the oven itself.

I would rail harder against this functionality limitation, but it’s almost moot based on the oven’s promise of no need to preheat. If you’re not preheating the oven, then you don’t really need to start it early—fair enough. The imposed limitations are still onerous and unnecessary.

But this is where the GE oven fails to be truly smart. June uses its built-in camera to identify whether food has been added within five minutes of reaching its temperature from a remote start and shuts it down if it hasn’t. The UltraFast Oven should include some kind of sensor or detection method to allow advanced functionality with the same safety precautions in place. That would be smart.

If you want to go all-in with the SmartHQ app you can use it to make a grocery list. That list can then be sent to Instacart to buy and deliver the items. The Flavorly Recipe Generator uses Google’s AI to craft recipes from an image of ingredients, a picture of current festivities, or a previous meal. I tried taking a picture of a few items in my fridge, but they were too basic to get anything interesting—I know I can make a sandwich with bread and deli meat.

I think these features show a meaningful disconnect and lack of understanding between someone who would buy a smart countertop oven and someone who would craft a meal from raw ingredients in their refrigerator. These are not the same types of people. Again, I would like to see the existing hardware be unlocked to make my lazy cooking even more convenient.

The Non-Smart Features Are Solid

The wireless connection is a highlight of the GE Profile UltraFast Oven and a reason to consider it over another option, but it’s still an appliance. The point of it is to cook food, and it needs to be able to heat things well.

I went through the basics to see how it performed against my current June countertop oven. I used it for toasting bread and bagels in the morning. I used it for bacon-wrapped chicken and other dinner meals. I also air-fried things I typically wouldn’t have just to put that mode through more of its paces.

Overall, the UltraFast Oven kept pace and worked as expected. Food was heated mostly even across the entire pan. For example, toasted bread showed browning faster on the tops when not pushed into the middle.

From what I can tell, food cooked just fine without preheating. That saves a little bit of time for the meal overall. It is hard to tell, however, if the oven is actually doing anything unique in this regard or if it’s just utilizing its smaller footprint to heat up quicker than a full-size oven. My other countertop ovens haven’t needed much time to get warm either.

Should You Buy the GE Profile UltraFast Smart Air Fry Oven?

The GE Profile UltraFast Smart Air Fry Oven is a reliable appliance that’s nice and compact. If you don’t need a full-sized oven to prepare larger meals, then it’s a great economical option that inherently has shorter cook times. Even if you never touch the wireless, connected features, it’s a fine countertop oven.

If you are after a modern, ultra-smart appliance, then you’ll probably end up a bit disappointed here. There are undoubtedly “smart” features in the mobile app, but they never resonated with me. I had to actively remember to use them for testing. GE is building toward some interesting smart appliances, but this oven just isn’t quite there yet.