The Year of the Rabbit…?
Initial thoughts of an Early Adopter
The first release of the rabbit r1 just happened two days ago on Tuesday night, 2024–04–23, at the TWA Hotel at Terminal 5 in the JFK airport. Great event overall, decor, lighting, drinks and appetizers, goody bag handouts, all hosting a lot of varied people. A live demo was presented, followed by the distribution of the r1 devices to the audience in an orderly manner on a conveyer belt.
First impression… good secure packaging, with nice case design. The device itself feels good in the hand with a good weight to it. Some devices weren’t fully charged, luckily the one I had was. A long press on the push-to-talk button and the device comes alive. Exciting to say the least, actually holding the device seeing the cute mascot animation… but then this is were all my assumptions started to be proven wrong. Connecting to Wi-Fi already showed that the analog scroll wheel feels slow; Let me change that in the settings; Nope, no setting for it. Okay, let me jump into the terminal and change the configuration; Nope, the terminal is just a text chat UI with the AI. Jumped on an audience’s member Wi-Fi to be presented with a notice that the device has to be plugged in. Without the update, the device can’t be used; Fair, I’ll just wait to get home. I believe, this limitation and the device not supporting Wi-Fi captive portals is why ~75% of the audience left after receiving their devices.
The next day, the device is all charged up and updated. Again, excited to chat and train my device to be my personal assistant and introduce it into my work flow. I notice the time is wrong, three hours off:
“Please, update your time to Eastern Time.”
“I cannot manually change the time zone of the device. The device’s time zone it set automatically.”
No setting for it either. Even though sometimes the device will hallucinate and direct you to do it yourself; No thank you. I could go on and on about the various failed attempts but it seems adjusting itself to its owner’s preferences was an oversight. As well as the touch screen when navigating the setting menu.
Let’s move on to taking notes, making lists, etc…
“List 5 movies similar to Her and email me them.”
“… Apologies, the function to send items via email is currently unavailable.”
All these issues and more have been brought up in Discord. Very active at the moment, as you can imagine. The team is responding quickly to issues and that is a great sign.
Following the White Rabbit
The device’s quality, quick responsiveness, pleasant haptic feedback when typing, and the ability to search in its current form are positive aspects. The inclusion of Perplexity AI adds value that justifies the cost of the device. As it stands now, I am not impressed with its functionality but will continue to support the team and hope future over-the-air updates (OTAs) will fix current issues and add new features. This device has the ability to enhance computer literacy across various segments of society, especially people with disabilities and seniors.
I personally feel the device is too restricted and should be opened up more. As a veteran programmer, my eyes lit up when I heard there was a terminal option but was disappointed to what I found; No commands to run on the system. The “connections” section of the “rabbithole” portal is slim pickings as I only use Uber from the services offered and rarely at that. This is a great opportunity to open this up to developers to add reviewed services that others would want to use. Let’s at least hope for a services store in the very near future.
Here is to the rabbit team for throwing a great event and getting this device into the hands of early adopters. I’m looking forward to seeing this device evolve into a personal assistant.
