If you hate doing laundry, the WiFi washers and dryers will enable you to hate doing your laundry from a distance. The brainchild of the Internet Home Alliance, the new Laundry Time system, outfits washers and dryers with WiFi and allows users to control the machines through e-mail, instant messaging, or cell phone. The WiFi washers can tell you when the wash and dry cycles are complete as well as accept commands to start, stop, or change cycles.

However, you can't tell your machines to sort and load your stinking clothes or unload it after washing it. WiFi or no WiFi, you can't make the washer transfer its load to the dryer. That, you still have to do yourself. Isn't that the part you hate?

So far, the only practical use for the WiFi washer and dryer is to alert you that the laundry is ready - if you live in a palace and you have a tendency to wander off and forget, that is. But nevertheless, the WiFi washer is a step forward. Or is it? Analyst Laura Champine says it is a solution searching for a problem to solve. "I've done my own laundry for four decades and I've never been away from my home and wondered how it's doing," she says. "Until the cell phone can load the dryer, I don't know how this technology will work for me."