Nabaztag : tag Review

Last week, I bought a nabaztag, this week it is gone. I returned it. It bought it for 145EUR, and the price is now 99EUR.

Nabaztag in a nutshell is a WiFi bunny released in 2006 to a sell – out audience and released once again late 2008 circa as a 2.0 version with additional features. It promises alot of things, like reading out your rss feeds to you, letting friends send messages, reads out the weather if you press and speak to its microphone, tai-chi with its ears, calls your mom if you put a baby rabbit to its stomach and so on. It has potential, but it won’t take over the world. Here’s why.

1. Setting up was a pain. I’m spoilt, and so is every consumer on the market. Apple was the leader in the term user experience and now every other company is following suit. So fixing up the bunny was a pain! I followed the instructions and set up the rabbit to the nearest wireless only to stare at it to wonder if it was alive, or not. Which leads me to…

2. Servers were down. Either that, or there was something wrong. I tried to log in a couple of times only to realize that the servers were down on one browser, and not on other. Huh???

3. The language on Violet.net suddenly morphed to French. I don’t speak French, I don’t intend to and I have enough problems with Dutch. I know Violet is a french company, but suddenly changing to French is one thing, and having the language change profile two degrees deep under a french term nobody except the French knows isn’t going to cut it.

4. The bunny showed no signs of life. I thought it was not working, then I realised that the violet light at the bottom meant that it was alive. Well, at least some ear moving would be nicer, or something to indicate that the nabaztag was actually alive.

5. It was kind of too expensive for the functionality. Well, some functions were neat I admit. And I’m a design-orientated low funcationality sort of person. But after the umpteenth time of sending my mom the same message “Hello this is Joanna” from my nanoztag, I think I got a little too bored.

6. The voice sounds funny. But all computer-related voices sound weird, just take a look at the lastest VoiceOver iPod Shuffle, they’ve never done much research on that area or at least never got near to a real person’s voice as far as I’m concerned.

7. Everything goes through the Violet Servers. Including the apps which you program using the APIs available.

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I think the bottom line is, I like the idea. Its cool, that’s why I wanted to buy it in the first place. I like the fact that you can program your bunny with the APIs available to do weird stuff as well. I wanted a place of my own where I had a WiFi bunny in the kitchen so I wasn’t stuck on the sofa with my MacBook all the time. I wanted my mom to buzz me now and then and my bunny pet to tell me stuff. However, I was stuck with server problems, language problems and the problem of it not recognizing my wireless connection (which I share with the rest of the housemates). I think if all that is solved, with the price point being about 70EUR, I would give it a shot again.

Check it out here: Nabaztag