As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have a rabbit. But seeing as we live in a 1st floor flat, we can’t really have a real rabbit. But instead, my girlfriend Joanne got me a Nabaztag rabbit, I named him Rowdy (after JD’s stuffed dog).

So I’ve had Rowdy for a few weeks now. I must admit, our first night with him was a problematic. Annoyingly I had problems setting him up. I do believe that alot of the problems I had are down to the manufacturers Violet. They provided details of how to get him connected to the WiFi, but that’s it. They then simply point you to my.nabaztag.com for everything else. The site is pretty easy to use, although it has to be as they obviously don’t believe in explanations, help or how to’s. The amount of support from Violet is pretty disapointing.

On the plus side though, as the support from Violet has been so poor, it has ‘forced’ the user community to grow. Searching for ‘nabaztag’ produces over 2million results, alot of which are user sites and forums.

So, I’ve managed to for 2 paragraphs without actually saying what he does. So here’s a ‘quick’ summary of what he does;

• Has moods (at random times through the day, he will complain, winge, or show he’s happy)
• Receive messages (Friends are able to send messages to the rabbit through the website and he’ll read them out, plus there is a facebook application for this to!)
• ‘Predicts’ the weather (My rabbit is scheduled at 10pm each day to predict the weather for the next day, although like a true weather man, he’s not always right)
• Reads RSS Feeds (You can add RSS feeds to the rabbit and he will read the headlines, although sometimes he struggles with some words)
• Plays Podcasts (He is supposed to play podcasts, although I haven’t managed to get this working yet and reading some of the forums, I’m not alone)
• Plays MP3’s (He can play specific MP3’s for various things, like the one I have below, which is set as my alarm)
• Tells the time (Surprising this is probably our favourite feature, every hour Rowdy will indicate the time. We have him set to ‘quirky’ so it’s rarely as simple as “It’s 10pm”, some of our favourites are “I can’t believe its only 4o’clock”, “this is the 16th time I’ve told you the time today”, “How would you ever tell the time without me”, “hey guys it’s 7 o’clock what we going to do”)

As much as we do like Rowdy, I must be fair and just let you know about a few problems. One of which I have mentioned above. Podcasts, I set Rowdy up to play the Scott Mills podcast from Radio1, what he actually done was say “Scott Mills”. That’s it. I also know that there has been some problems with Violet’s servers. Especially around xmas!

 I wanted to ’show him off’ as well as just tell you about him, so here he is doing a few of his tricks:

Rowdy saying hello (he’s actually saying “Hello everyone at ITPro. My name is rowdy and I just wanted to say hello”.

Rowdy telling the time

Rowdy saying good morning

Rowdy ‘predicting’ the weather - all though I don’t know for sure, I doubt it’s going to be 4 degrees and snowing tomorrow!

I’m still learning when it comes to Nabaztag, there are many other services I haven’t tried, and there is even an API for people to create there own services/applications. I haven’t even started with this yet.

If I do find any new Nabaztag bits and peices I’ll post them.  But it works both ways, if there is anything you know about Nabaztag that I haven’t mentioned, please post a comment for all to see!

 Thanks,

 Arron and Rowdy