More about the rabbit

I've had some more time to play with my Rabbit (Nabaztag/tag) now, and can say a little more about my findings. The hardware is lovely, well constructed and solid feeling. The rabbit sits around 20 cm in height. It has a slightly curved bottom so that you can see the pulsing violet glow that tells you it is connected to the internet. It has three large multi-coloured LEDs in its abdomen, and one in its face. It also has a microphone for voice recognition. The ears are on magnetic clips and are therefore easy to replace. The service / software side is still a big problem. I finally found out that only the secure http website was down, the normal one was still running. I've finally been able to make configuration changes that stick, but there are still many issues:

• many services just don't work at the minute, including most RSS feeds;
• there seems to be some serious flaws in the website, time values in 12 hour clock don't seem to work well;
• there may be a timezone problem too.

On the other hand, it has spoken, and the speech synthesis and messaging is astoundingly good. The mp3 functionality works well. I have got it flashing as a weather forecast, doing Tai Chi and so on. Nice... The voice recognition currently is deactivated. When you hold the button on the top and talk, an LED indicates the device "hears" you. It's just that nothing happens with that yet. All in all, very rough around the edges (although I'm pretty used to that), but great potential.

Posted by ct