Smart Toaster? I think not.

After my parents tried out my Krups wide-mouth toaster, they decided that they wanted a wide-mouthed toaster to toast wider-sliced bread and bagels. They bought the Proctor-Silex SmartToast.

They are really disappointed with the purchase. While it can handle bread that is sliced thickly or bagels, a whole slice of bread won't fit in it without sticking out of the top. So you have to toast a piece of bread, wait for it to pop up, then flip it and toast the other half. This doesn't seem like a very smart toaster, does it? What's more, the toaster won't toast the second half of the bread until it cools down a bit...so you are guaranteed a half cold piece of toast!

On the plus side:

* It's appearance is very nice. It comes in black or white and it looks very nice on the counter.

* The dial is really simple to use. It's numbered from 1 to 6 with 1 being light and 6 being dark. And, except for the part about the toast not fitting into the toaster all the way, it does toast half of the bread the way you would expect it to.

* The handle you use to pull down the toast or pop it up, is nice and large so it's easy to use.

* There's a crumb tray that is easy to remove which makes clean up easy.

If you are in the market for a new toaster, I'd say skip this one or wait for next year's model to come out. It looks like this toaster is headed to Good Will soon and will be replaced by a Krups toaster.