French talking rabbit reads the news

THE NABAZTAG is bizarre, for it is, in fact, a talking rabbit, writes Luke Peters While devotees of the Sega Idog or Aibo (the latter has now been put down by Sony) will have no qualms with this concept, most of us will be asking the same question: why?

Nabaztag automatically connects to your home Wifi network and will read the news and weather (from selected sources), tell you the time, read emails and SMS messages and will even give its opinion on how well you have been interacting.

In short, it's a sort of Tamagotchi for grown ups.

Setting up the Nabaztag is relatively straightforward; attach it to the mains and wait for it to hunt down your Wifi signal (there's no Ethernet port) and Bob's your uncle.

WPA security isn't supported, leaving you no option but to revert to the less secure Wep alternative. But a WPA version is scheduled to appear this year, although it won't be possible to upgrade the current version.

The rabbit needs personalising at the Nabaztag website. You give it a name, choose what noises you wan t it to make and determine what services it will provide.

But because Nabaztag is French in design and still very much in a teething stage, many of its features aren't aimed at the UK market. At present, it will only read traffic reports from France and will only read out SMS and voicemails if sent from France. Handy.

Paying 3.90Euros for Full Rabbit services gives you Google Talk, Full Email alerts (which allows you to personalise the alerts), the ability to broadcast a Nabcast, your own stock market info and any RSS feed.

The Full Friend Rabbit service costs 5.90Euros adds other bits and bobs, including the ability to send free rabbit messages to friends who also own Nabaztags.

Although our Nabaztag told us the weather in London, the time (on every hour) and spun his ears around gaily, reading news from the BBC RSS feed was less impressive.

Uncommon words were hard to decipher, complicated names and phrases weren't pronounced correctly and its general speaking tone wasn't fluid. At least it wasn't in French.

Still, there is a thriving community in France, which demonstrates how much more of a gimmick Nabaztag appears to be.

Once services are properly localised, the Nabaztag could be your new best friend. µ

L'INQ
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