doing the robot since, well, 2010
Welcome to the shiny, spinny, flappy, dancey world of the Rolly, a robotic MP3 player. Cute, fun but perhaps a little pointless.
Unveiled this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, this fit-in-your-pocket device is first looks like an egg-shaped MP3 player. However, it is not your standard egg-shaped MP3 player, if there even is one, since it is a robot and it can dance. Whut?! Yes, dance. Using the two wheels around its body it can roll about to your music. The glee doesn’t stop there though, it also has little flappy arms connected to tiny shoulders on each end that it flaps, folds and body-pops for your enjoyment. The Rolly also has the capability to keep you mesmerised by firing waves and particles of approximately 700 different colours warmly onto your retina. All whilst it spews out your rubbish music through potentially tinny speakers as you sit in your kitchen stuffing crisps into your face and clapping manically.
Rather than it having an LCD screen to control your music, or whatever it is you describe it as, you can “simply” spin the Rolly either way to make it play or skip a tune. Hold it vertically and you can adjust the volume with “simple” pirouettes. I can’t figure out how you make the thing stop, but I think you might have to “simply” hold it at a 47 degree angle to the trajectory of Venus in comparison to Mars whilst whistling the theme tune from Neighbours. Backwards.
The Rolly is a 2GB beast, so you can hold around 520 songs on it, but Sony decided it didn’t need to have a headphone jack. And this is why I think it is pointless. When the going price is $229 (only due to be released in spring in the US), I can think of plenty of other MP3 players to spend my hard-earned pennies on that I can actually use in the traditional sense of an MP3 player in that they would have headphones. Saying this, I would still enjoy owning one – after all, you can program it with your very own dance routines using included software and it will even accept music wirelessly through Bluetooth – and cry with joy as I watch it do its thing whilst sitting in my kitchen stuffing crisps into my face and clapping manically.
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