Karotz internet rabbit review

Karotz – the world’s first internet rabbit. It’s got an adorable aesthetic, but is its functionality as endearing? Can a device steeped in connectivity, including Wi-Fi, internet access, a webcam, microphone, speakers, a USB port and an RFID reader live up to its potential?

Well, sort-of. We were incredibly excited about the rabbit – it’s one of the most attractive and aesthetically fun consumer electronics devices available. It also offers huge potential – with all the technology inside, it could do almost anything.

Which is exactly the problem. Thanks to awkward voice recognition, it does do almost anything – but not what you want. Considering the device only controllable via oral commands, you can see why this was a real downer.

Note: We should mention that we received an early build – if the voice recognition issue is solved, the device could be brilliant.

We got simple tasks sorted – it responded to the voice commands for the “Home” app, which then took a picture of the speaker and sent it to our smartphone – perfect for parents waiting on children to return home from school.

Unfortunately, despite 20 minutes of trying, we only managed to get Tai Chi to work once – and then couldn’t find any way to stop it. Nor could we work out how to stop the RSS news feeds from talking when we bored of the news.

Functions such as Twitter and Facebook updates are not yet available, although the scheduling feature – choosing when the rabbit talks to you – would come in super-useful for these functions. Waking up to your Facebook feedback could be a great way to start the day.

The real promise comes from the developer community. MindScape, the company behind Kartoz, know that letting developers loose on the thing will produce the best apps. Therefore they’ve create a development kit and been completing encouraging towards third=party developers.

The results? Well, we’ll see sometime soon. What we want? Skype and Spotify, please.