Nabaztag now officially sucks

Not so long ago this little guy was the most popular geek toy. The intelligent wi-fi rabbit that can be programmed using very basic API to read the news, e-mail messages, stream mp3 music, online radio and tell the weather, turned out to be a waste of money. Here is the deal. Violet company that makes nabaztag bunnies had a false flash demonstration on their website. If you visited nabaztag.com around June last year (or earlier), you would see the bunny happily streaming Internet radio, reading e-mails and sending messages to other nabaztag owners by voice. Also, one could see nabazatag reading children books, recognizing objects and much more cool stuff all thanks to RFID support which never became available. I got my bunny (led by on-site demo) last year (see earlier posts for details).

At the time people at Violet were promising RFID support. The bunny worked quite well on my Mac and I was happily toying around with it. There were some glitches with the bunny but nothing serious. Problems arrived in December last year when Violet announced that they are changing platform and switching to Jabber. That change should make the bunny work and respond faster. That hasn’t happened!

Users had to wait for months for Violet to officially roll out Jabber platform and when they finally did, it turns to be a total disaster. Truth is that Nabaztag is now quicker but it does not work as it used to anymore. The bloody thing now won’t go to sleep or wake up at scheduled times, read rss feeds regularly and sometimes even refuses to connect at all. I’d strongly advise anyone who is thinking of buying nabaztag now, to stay away from it. Not to mention that RFID support is still unavailable.

My Nabaztag tag has finally arrived

Ready to unpack it…

Almost done…

Weather: Sunny!

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