Finally, my production R1 arrived. I took it out of the box and set it up - a process that could go a lot smoother, in my opinion - and immediately started.
My first query was vision, and it identified my friend’s Norfolk terrier as a poodle. Great start. Then, I asked it to play a few songs on Apple Music, and it reliably refused to play any of my personal albums, albums not in the AM catalogue I uploaded to Apple Music through the Mac app to play on my devices. This is very disappointing, because I listen to a lot of music that’s obscure and not on services like Spotify or Apple Music.
Then, the real disaster happened. I asked R1 to record a note. I talked into it, and idly tossed it on my desk as I usually do with my phone. R1 interpreted this as opening the settings, and as such stopped the recording without any feedback that that happened, or a way to recover the partial recording. In addition, it also refused to answer any queries until I reset memory.
You might say this is user error, and, fine. I tried again. This time I got a good 3 minutes in before R1 just stopped again, this time because it disconnected from the internet. I didn’t move, the Wifi was working, as was the SIM chip in there, it just stopped. Again, no way to recover the recording.
The third recording finally did work, but it had consistent issues with interpreting my English accent. Make of this what you will.
And then there’s all the little cuts that add up over time. No 24 hour clock. Battery drain is still atrocious. No way to manually check for updates. The music player experience is a nightmare because there’s no transport controls, and only being able to close the player through a memory reset is patently absurd. There also seems to be no visual feedback for Magic Camera, which just… happened a few times while in vision. I found that out later in the rabbit hole.
When I got so frustrated I asked it to play any 80s song, it rick rolled me. Fair enough, that one’s on me.
I want to like this device. I want to root for it. There are things that are good about it - the voice is nice, the microphones don’t sound terrible, and the whole rabbit aesthetic is very cute. I just wish it, yknow, worked.
And that’s not even talking about LAM. I am in europe, so I can’t test Uber (we have trams), Doordash (not available here) or Midjourney (why would I do that on such a tiny screen, if at all).
So far, the device basically fails at everything it sets out to do. It wants to be the best voice recorder, as Jesse said, and it has deleted 66% of my recordings. It wants to be a music player, and it doesn’t even have a fast forward button. It wants to be a helpful little guy, but it struggles with the most basic questions. It wants to be a functional device, but only works if you’re lucky, and if you do a memory reset.
This is embarassing. It’s ridiculous that anyone on the team thought this was ready to be shipped, even after multiple major software updates. I defended the device online because “surely it can’t be that bad”, but it is. From my limited interactions with a friend’s TWA R1, I gave it a 6/10 in a feedback round once, but this is worse. This is a 2/10 at best, and I’m being generous.
This isn’t to say that I think all hope is lost. Despite everything I still want to believe in the R1, I think it could be the natural evolution of things like the iPod - it’s a non-phone you can interact with naturally that doesn’t get in the way. But to be that, it (in my eyes) needs the following improvements:
- Enable the touch screen for interactions, everything else is ridiculous, this device has one button and that one is already overused (five times? Seriously?)
- Fix the music player, and maybe take the L on this. Both Apple Music and Spotify offer APIs that are a lot more robust. My Sonos speaker has never told me that it’s “still launching the Apple Music rabbit”. This is a fixed problem.
- Add some basic functionality that has literally no dependencies. A 24-hour clock. An alarm. A calculator, maybe. A functioning voice recorder that I can pause and browse on-device. Seriously, they had this figured out in the 60s.
- Stop being so opinionated. Despite what you may think, shaking to go to settings is a stupid idea. Just add a menu you can swipe in from the side or something, I dunno.
My critisisms just boil down to this:
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. This could be a great product but you insist on putting “AI” everywhere. We have had APIs for music services. You do not need to make a new, demonstrably worse way of accessing these services.
Honestly, I’m glad this just is an android device, because that at least means I can hack these features in there if I want to.
But I think I’ll just not bother.
Rabbit certainly didn’t.
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