By Ryan Nill
Sony finally acknowledges the rumors and announces the Rolly; a wireless speaker/audio player that rolls, dances and shimmers in time to your music. It looks like a large, white egg. While vaguely iPod-like in appearance, it promises to be so much more.
The device is essentially a wireless speaker/audio player with stereo speakers, with an internal flash memory of 1GB and about 5 hours of battery life. It can also link to your computer via Bluetooth, allowing it to receive new dance patterns and songs. That’s not all: there’s tactile volume control (control the volume by turning the unit clockwise) and an alarm clock. Above all else, it also dances and grooves along with you and your music, as you can witness in the below video.
The Rolly will be available in Japan on Sept. 29 for about 350$. No clue when it will be coming to the US, but the niche market for dancing electronics is already clamoring for it.
[ SONY ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]
Clearly I am getting to be a right old git (at the age of 34) since I can see no point to this thing at all. You couldn’t make it up, could you? Someone walked into a product development meeting at Sony and suggested that they make an audio player, shaped like an egg that shuffles back and forth on the floor, flashing it’s lights and flapping around like it’s having some sort of electronic fit. Instead of doing what they should have done and firing the bloke for smoking jazz cigarettes at work, the actually went and built it! Then they gave it a stupid name and produced a dodgy ad for it with an incredibly annoying bloke doing an even more annoying dance, mimicking the movements of the machine. Well, it shows us one thing – You can sell just about almost anything these days if you tell people it’s cool. Does anyone want to buy my new project? It’s a turd which sings Frank Sinatra classics and answers the ‘phone for you in a funny voice.
Maybe if they sell it as an alarm-clock it might actually have a usefull purpose. There are allready some similar (but ugly) products on the market. Bleep Bleep and if you don’t get up. It runs away from you so you cant snooze it and keeps on playing music (bleeping) that would be cool. Now its just a gadget….Mmh guess the good days of Sony are really over…hehe