This year two buzzy startups have been trying to cash in on the AI craze by introducing portable devices designed to let you use AI assistant software on the go without pulling your phone out of your pocket. But if early reviews are anything to go by, neither of those companies has delivered a compelling reason for why you’d actually want to do that… and more importantly, the products they’ve rushed to market aren’t very good.
Reviewers widely panned the Humane Ai Pin in April. And while I was holding out some hope that the Rabbit R1 might be a little less awful, it seems the nicest things most reviewers can say about the Rabbit R1 are that it’s cute and its $200 price tag is a lot easier to swallow than the $699 price for the Humane Ai Pin (which also requires a $24/month subscription). But both devices have a limited feature set at launch, and many of those features don’t even work consistently.
The Rabbit R1 hardware is also kind of baffling. It has a touchscreen display, but you only use touch for the on-screen keyboard. Navigation is handled by a button and scroll wheel, but the default scrolling sensitivity settings are maddening (you have to scroll a lot to actually do anything), and aside from answering questions (sometimes incorrectly), the Rabbit R1 only lets you interact with four apps right now – and you could perform the same actions in those apps more quickly and efficiently with a phone.
Since both the Rabbit R1 and Humane Ai Pin are basically dumb terminals for cloud-based software, it’s possible that the user experience could improve over time. But right now both devices appear to massively fail to live up to the promises made by the startups that released them.
I haven’t touched a Rabbit R1 myself, but I’ve rounded up some of the first reviews I’ve seen, and they’re all bad. Like really, really bad.
Rabbit R1 reviews
Security above all else—expanding Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative [Microsoft]
Following several high profile security breaches, Microsoft says it’s making security its “top priority… above all else” across all of its products including Windows, Microsoft 365, and Azure.
abxylute a1 Mobile Controller [abxylute]
The makers of the Abxylute handheld game console (made for cloud game streaming) have announced that their next device is the abxylute a1 customizable mobile controller with hall effect joysticks and triggers. Pricing and launch date TBA.
Keep up on the latest headlines by following @liliputing_liliputing.com on Mastodon (or @[email protected]). You can also follow Liliputing on X and Facebook. We’re also on Bluesky now, but just barely.
This post was originally published on 3rd party site mentioned in the title of this site
