How about a robot with built in VGA camera and controlled from your mobile over Bluetooth, well perhaps the Rob-1 from Sony Ericsson is more than a little wacky but people have bought the Sony Aibo dog so why not a spherical Bluetooth bot?
The 110mm diameter silver sphere contains a 200 MHz, ARM-9, Dragonball processor and 2mb of memory and tips the scales at a shade under 1 Kg, it looks a little like those cheap kit radio controlled spheres that you see on gadget sites but that is an unkind comparison. The VGA camera can stream at a rate of up to 15 frames per second back to the Bluetooth handset which then displays the image using software which needs to be uploaded to the phone.
The Rob-1 is compatible with the Sony Symbian phones P900, P910 and K750i and any phone with a java platform supporting Bluetooth™ API JSR-82, other Bluetooth enabled phones will be able to get still images back from the Rob-1 but not the streaming video.
Driving your rob-1 from the mobile phone is simple enough using the custom app and the Sony user interface, whether you are roaming around the office trying to find female members of staff in short skirts or around the house annoying your dog the rob-1’s camera can be tilt 70 degrees up and 20 degrees down for the ideal shot.
Want to operate your Rob in the dark, well it has a set of ultra bright leds to illuminate its path although these aren’t really enough to shed enough light to take great pictures or video, but with a bit of practice you’ll be driving your silver sphere like a gadget mad Schumacher brother in no time.
The Rob-1 from Sony comes hot on the heels of their Bluetooth controlled car and represents the more entertaining side of the mobile phone giant, while a Bluetooth sphere with a web cam isn’t a match for an Aibo its likely to be a lot cheaper when it goes on sale.
