As my wife can attest, I have zero ability to resist various gadgets if they’re below a certain price. Be it the Analogue Pocket, the Playdate, the Game & Watch reissue or countless Amazon-enabled monstrosities (yes, including the branded Dash Buttons), nobody is denying that it is absolutely a problem.

This is a long way of saying that I obviously slammed pre-order back in January on the Rabbit R1, which arrived Saturday afternoon.

For those not familiar, this thing (along with the infamous Humane AI Pin) is part of a new emerging category: the standalone AI device.

Here’s the announcement video from a few months back:

Time will tell if it ends up occupying a place in my daily routine (especially once it gains more of the advertised abilities), but here’s my initial take on it a few days in:

The Good

• A nice unboxing experience, and the included plastic case/desktop stand is a useful and unexpected touch
  
  
• The hardware is great, super solid feeling and delightfully orange
  
  
• While I’m sure the image quality isn’t gonna change the world, the rotating camera is very clever, and the “what am I looking at?” results are either pretty good or amusing when wrong
  
  
• The rabbit mascot is generally adorable
  
  
• The simple “press to talk” button to get (pretty fast!) AI answers is kind of magical, it’s like having a very capable assistant always at the other of end of a walkie-talkie, and it may change my “what else was this guy in?” or “how old is she these days?” game when watching a show or movie
  
  
• Midjourney works great (though it requires a paid account), and it’s borderline sorcery to conjure up AI image shenanigans with only your voice
  
  
• The ability to easily start recording a voice memo that’s then stored in the cloud and summarized with AI is pretty slick, I feel a bit like Dale Cooper talking to robo-Diane
  
  
• The ability to point the camera at a chunk of text and tell it to “explain this to me like I’m a 3rd grader” is fairly incredible

The Eh

• The Rabbithole (a tremendous name) portal is pretty barebones at the moment, definitely lots of room to improve/expand
  
  
• The Spotify connection works as advertised, but it’s currently not great at playing full albums (seems good at specific songs and decent at artists generally), maybe future updates will address this

The Bad

• Battery life so far is rough in this first week (prob goes down like 10% or more an hour just in standby), but I hear the first OTA patch may resolve UPDATE: Looks like this is rolling out now!
  
  
• Only four 3rd-party integrations right now (hurry up!)

Wishlist

• If the display would (optionally) stay on while plugged in, it could be a cool desktop clock and/or album art display device when Spotify is playing
  
  
• Given that it has a SIM slot, the ability to receive and dictate short messages (via whichever messaging service) might let this thing become a viable phone alternative from time to time