The Rabbit Saga, pt. 3

The little thing sprang into life about 11pm last night. I cannot say I felt a feeling of joy as much as a feeling of relief, stemming from the possibility that the woes might finally be over (see pts. 1 and 2). I have to say that I am underwhelmed by what the rabbit has to offer. It's almost like the salt in the wound, which was so close to healing.

The rabbit is supposed to be able to read RSS feeds and play podcasts, but both of these features are disabled at the moment. Violet say that they want to concentrate on fixing their servers before these features begin to work, but bearing in mind that the server problems were caused by incompetence on their part (a failure to estimate the demand over the Christmas period, rather than, say, a lightning strike, or colossal hardware failure), this only serves to frustrate.

Perhaps the most exciting feature on offer, the API, is not working either. The API is the mechanism which allows users to create their own applications (either programs, or web-based tools) that can interact with rabbits, doing things like sending messages, controlling the lights and moving the ears. This would really open up the rabbit to the community and allow for some neat ideas to come into play. I only hope the API is fixed (and fixed into a sensible format) soon.

My opinion of this product is unchanged. I strongly advise against buying one of these. What you get is really just a budget wireless card attached to a speaker and some LEDs. It doesn't even have a built-in text-to-speech (TTS) engine, which really shocked me. Instead, the Violet servers convert the text to audio, and the audio is downloaded to the rabbit, in an orgy of unnecessary bandwidth consumption.

There will definitely be more devices like this in the near future. With wireless spreading throughout Western homes like wildfire, it will only be a matter of time before something much better (and hopefully more reliable) comes along. With any luck, it will be provided by a company who take customer service seriously.