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The UtiliTea Kettle from Adagio ($49, via Adagio's website) has everything we want in an electric kettle, and it has transformed our tea and coffee habits. In fact, it has all the features we wanted, plus one very special thing we didn't know we wanted until we saw it.

This kettle has a variable temperature setting so that you can heat the water to the lower temperatures needed for green or white teas. Green tea will get scorched and bitter if you steep it in boiling water, so tea drinkers often resort to watching thermometers stuck in cups of boiling water, waiting for the temperature to come down.

This kettle makes that unnecessary. For us, although we are tea-drinkers as well as coffee-drinkers, the chief benefit is to our morning coffee. We can heat the water for our daily French press to just under boiling, as it should be.

The UtiliTea met all of our other key criteria for a kettle too:

• Stainless steel body
• Cordless: The kettle lifts easily and smoothly off its base for filling and cleaning.
• Heats so fast! Just a minute or so for half a kettle of water.
• Easy to handle: Only 1 liter in volume, which might be small for some but is perfect for us.

We really like the size of this slightly smaller kettle; it fits easily under the spout of our too-small sink faucet, and it's not too heavy.

A recent redesign by Adagio added a button so the lid can be popped open - so one-handed use is easy too. They also added a water viewing clear strip, so it's easy to see how much is in the kettle, and how hard the water is boiling.

We really can't recommend it highly enough - we are not sure why we lived without an electric kettle up until now! If this one stands the test of time it will probably be one of our favorite appliances ever. We drink quite a bit more tea every day - this kettle just makes it that much easier.

Have you tried this, or do you use another type of electric kettle?