Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Positives: nicely detailed, cute animated routines, sounds actually come from the droid instead of the phone (yay!). Now to the disappointments: (Note: Latest firmware and app version installed at time of posting. Some of these cons are related to the app, which was apparently rushed). Patrol Mode is a complete trainwreck: Watch my posted video if you’ve always wanted to see R2 bash his head against a wall repeatedly for 4 minutes. I could have filmed it for an hour, but you get the idea. R2 runs into the first wall he come across, and that’s it. He cannot figure his way out of such a perplexing conundrum. Just keeps spinning those treads. Occasionally he will turn around to face the other direction and you think “Success!” but - psych! - he’s just trolling you. He’ll turn back again and continue trying to punch his way through the wall. His decisions are also incredibly slow. You’d think when a toy like this hits a wall it would react quickly and just choose another direction, but I think this little fella gets concussion each time because it takes him a while to shake it off and try something else (which turns out to be the same thing that failed the last time). The app has to be open at all times, even when R2 is in passive mode: One of the features I like is that R2 will happily sit there on your desk, beeping and stomping away occasionally. It’ll do this while charging too, which is nice. Unfortunately, if you’re hoping that this can happen in the background while you’re using other apps (or the phone!) or you just don’t like the idea of leaving an app open all day, you’re out of luck. If I decide to keep the toy I’m going to try to dig into the SDK to see if I can keep it active with my computer’s Bluetooth. I’ve heard you can set up the SDK to get R2 to announce when you have mail etc., which would be cool. Controls locked out while it’s on the charger: This is just nuts. You can’t show off it’s cute little pre-programmed routines unless you unplug it first. This doesn’t sound like much, but in the absence of a conductive charging station like the BB-8, plugging/un-plugging mini-USB repeatedly becomes a drag after a while. Worse still, the new app now also locks out BB-8 controls while that droid is charging - a big downgrade from the dedicated BB-8 app. Simple solution: lock out driving controls if you must, but allow stationary controls. “Watch With Me” just doesn’t work: I’m happy to be corrected, but I’ve tested this with both R2 and BB-8 on iPad and iPhone. It just stays there on the instruction screen when you start the movie, the droids staying silent and inert. For comparison I tested the BB-8 with it’s original app under exactly the same conditions and it worked fine (and is pretty cool!). Side-note to developers: BB should become excited as soon as it “hears“ the booming theme music at the start of the movie. It’s an appropriate response :) but more importantly it would let us know immediately if the feature is working or not, rather than waiting until minutes into the movie. Interaction between droids: This was promised but is MIA as far as I can tell. Of course, neither droid (BB-8 or R2) has a microphone or any way to tell where the other droid is so I guess this was always going to be a case of over-promise and under-deliver. Given current hardware, the only way these droids could possibly “interact” is while stationary and next to the phone (and again, I’ve yet to make this happen). How cool if you could set them patrolling and when they come near each other they stop to have a chat. Not going to happen. Missed Opportunities: The lack of the features below have not influenced my rating because they were never promised (unless you find the video of R2 stopping at the edge of a table misleading) but I feel they represent huge missed opportunities. On the other hand, inclusion of these features would probably have let me overlook some of the cons above). - I have an Iron Giant figure from 15 years ago that has a tiny motion sensor in front to detect when you walk past it, triggering a response. How nice if R2 could do that. - Proximity detection. With the BB-8 I understood that it’s form factor made things like built-in cameras unfeasible (but that didn’t stop me wishing for it) so I gave it a pass. R2-D2 has no such excuses. He has a faux camera/eye right there, front and centre, just begging for a real camera. It would allow Roomba-style collision avoidance. Add a little pinhole camera underneath for table edge detection. Allow us to watch the video feed of R2 while he’s on Patrol. Better yet, let us pilot R2 through the feed when he’s out of sight! Please don’t tell me it was to keep the price down. This thing is $299 in Australia and every cheap flying drone out there these days has this sort of tech built in. Another quick suggestion for the devs: The “Draw & Drive” mode is cool, but how about making it so that if the user chooses to close the path (joining the end of the line to the beginning) it automatically repeats the circuit until stopped? I think that would encourage users to program all sorts of complicated paths around the room. I’d love to be able to sit there on the couch watching TV while R2 protects my perimeter! In this scenario you should let users save (and name?) their favourite paths too. Again it would encourage more time and effort being put into their creation. It also could REALLY use a "forward" indicator to tell you where you should start drawing so that the droid doesn't immediately change direction. I guess that’s it. I’ve had it for a day and was thinking of returning it, but the front-leg scuff plate is already, well, scuffed. No big deal, but I might have to sell it on ebay instead. I’ll keep it for a while to see if any app/firmware updates improve things, and see if I can get anything interesting out of the SDK. Cheers.