BUG Übergadget Available Monday

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By Evan Ackerman

Remember the BUG? You know, this thing that I took a look at back in December? Well, Bug Labs was at CES (of course), showing off their more or less finalized hardware that’ll be going on sale Monday around noon EST. If you think you might like to get your hands on one early, you’ll be rewarded with a discount… Here’s how the prices are looking:

• BUGbase – $349 ($299 w/discount)
• LCD module – $119 ($99 w/discount)
• GPS module – $99 ($79 w/discount)
• Camera module – $79 ($69 w/discount)
• Motion detector / Accelerometer – $59 ($49 w/discount)

There should be an additional discount if you buy the whole kit at once; not sure yet exactly how much that’ll work out to. Now, here’s the fine print: the discounts apply for 60 days, and the hardware won’t start shipping until around March 17th. Also, before you whip out your credit card for one of these bad boys, you should note that there’s been a few rather important changes to the base module. The good: it’s officially been named the Hiro P module. The bad (maybe): the menu navigation is joystick based rather than button based. The ugly (really ugly): there’s no integrated WiFi. Why not? In short, Bug Labs is determined to keep all of the BUG software open source, and it’s been a bitch to get open source WiFi drivers to play nice. The solution? Within the next few months, they’ll have a BUG module with 802.11g WiFi, and they’ll sell it to you at cost if you get one of these early versions.

Or, you could just wait and get it all in one package, but they’re not sure how long it’s gonna take, and it’ll certainly cost more.

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Lastly, Bug Labs is working on another module. No, it’s not a cell phone module (bah), it’s called the Von Hippel module, and it’ll add “an interface of inputs and outputs to the BUG, allowing users to “hack” their BUG even further.” No more specs on that, as of yet. We’ll keep you updated, especially once the early adopter kits start shipping and people begin messing with using these things.

[ BUG Labs ]

2 COMMENTS

  1. I still don’t get what it does??? I’m assuming the attachments let it turn into all kinds of things like a camera, mp3 player etc but it’ll never work. Things that try to do everything end up being rubbish compared to things that do one thing good.

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