Pleo Review - A Toy Robot Triumph?

SkinnyGuy writes "PCMag has one of the first reviews of the new robotic dinosaur. Is it worth $350? I think this reviewer thinks so. 'What most people will have a hard time understanding is that Ugobe's Pleo is one of the most sophisticated personal home entertainment robotic devices on the market today. It easily outshines robot toys from Wow Wee and Hasbro, though both companies offer robots that cost less than half of what Pleo does. Its nearest competitor, the Wow Wee Robopanda, is a good gift for young children, but it's not nearly as adorable, animated, or intelligent as Pleo. (Yes, it can stand up and crawl, but it doesn't look very good doing it.)'"

See it in action

[Itninja]

Thinkgeek has had these for sale for awhile (originally pre-order - currently out-of-stock). They have a pretty decent video hosted on their site. [thinkgeek.com] IMO, nothing can ever beat my Teddy Ruxpin..... /tears up

Get a Dog

[SpaceAmoeba]

Dogs are 10^8% better.

Cuter than that japanese robot baby abomination

[ueltradiscount]

This one would probably give the whole family nightmares... http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x25zzd_babyrobot-made-in-japan_news [dailymotion.com]

But does it run linux?

[adwarf]

It doesn't seem like their development kit (which I can't even find an official reference to on their website) can do much. That makes it useless to people that want to do more than play with it until someone finds a way to crack it to run custom code.

Re:$350 toy?

[pushing-robot]

Actually, the GP was spot on. Africa needs political stability and economic development, not handouts from the west. We pat ourselves on the back for saving lives through food and medical aid, yet all we end up doing is increasing the population beyond the environment's sustainable capacity, condemning more people to suffer, fighting over and wasting the same limited resources.

The reason few in power care about a real solution is that a stone-age economy hardly competes for resources with industrialized nations, and a broken society is easy to exploit. It's easy to see how governments and corporations would rather maintain the status quo, keeping oil and labor cheap, than invest in a new competitive market.

What we really need is World Bank [wikipedia.org] reform; it was created after World War II for the exact purpose of nation-building and reconstruction. Unfortunately, it's swayed into the hands of the increasingly exploitative US government as well as large corporations, and has lost a great deal of credibility worldwide. A revived World Bank system, with more focus on its key objectives and less control by individual nations and big business, could do far more to heal Africa and other poor regions than the band-aids of food and medicine.

Anyway, what was the topic of this thread again?