...stuff I do and things I like...

One of my colleges just bought a Nabaztag so I had some time to play with it. The Nabaztag is a small WiFi Toy in the shape of a rabbit. It basically consists out of some WiFi chip, a speaker, a microphone, a bunch of color LEDs and some mechanics to move it's ears. The thing doesn't have a real purpose it is just a toy. The Nabaztag claims to be able to read out my emails, RSS feeds, weather information and many other things. The device is configured via a web interface on the Nabaztag.com website where you first register the device. Here you can select the applications you want to run on your device. One can select a date/time for each application so you can get the weather report every hour or so. One of the main features of the Nabaztag is the voice interaction with the device. Press the button on the bunny's head and speak a command. We found this to not work very well - it sucked! The guy who bought the Nabaztag then tried to listen to shoutcast (mp3) streams on his Nabaztag (one of the new features of the second version) - this was disappointing again. The stream was choppy and didn't sound very good (he actually setup a local shoutcast server in order to rule out a bad internet connection but still it did not sound good). In the end he actually sent it back after 2 days of testing - it was just too bad.

The Chumby is another device like the Nabaztag but it is more visual since it has a small display build in. After the bad experience with the Nabaztag I would really like to test the Chumby to see if it is as bad. Actually I don't think it is as bad - but who knows?!

[1] nabaztag.com
[2] wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabaztag
[3] Chumby