I played with a new Star Wars BB-8 droid and am way too excited about it.
One of the features of kids born in the 1960s and 70s is the near-constant lamentation that our kids have way cooler toys than we grew up with. I mean, who didn't want a beep-booping, wailing and whooping R2-D2 toy as a kid in the early 80s? The best we got were some pretty bangin' collectable action figures that gave GI Joe a run for his money.
One of the standout attractions of the new Star Wars movie, directed by Hollywood's current favourite son J.J. Abrams, is the rolling "how did they do that" ball-shaped droid BB-8. This little orange and white robot is like R2, but with a head that floats above a sphere that bumbles along in awkwardly comic ways that kids are going to flip over.
That's movie magic though. How could the toy ever measure up in real life?
When I heard that Sphero was producing this little beauty, I was nonplussed; the original Sphero toys were interesting only because a ball rolled around on its own and lit up in various colours. The downsides were that, controlled by your smartphone, it was laggy and hard to wrangle and kind of a charmless white ball of plastic. It was a blank canvas that needed users to invent games they could play with a remote-controlled ball.
The new BB-8 Sphero has none of the problems of the old model.
First, the app is completely redone and offers all manner of fine-grained but fun controls (like the ability to raise and lower the default speed of the droid, and hilarious little speed boosts where it kicks it up a notch). It's also packed with sounds, music and effects from the movies.
BB-8 also has a lot of personality. Not only does that head stay on top thanks to the magic of magnets but it stays oriented in the direction it's travelling. The faster you go, the harder the head has to work to stay up there, but even when it causes BB to "trip," it's still cute. It makes a lot of noise, but the robot's squeals and blips aren't dumb; they react to the way you're driving and to its movements. If you slam BB into a wall, it'll give you an annoyed raspberry. The controls are a lot tighter and more responsive than earlier versions, and the app is much faster to move between options, too.
There's also a "patrol" mode where BB can explore a room on its own using proximity sensors, and again it responds to its environment: In my test, BB backed itself into a corner and made that lowing moan of distress that you might associate with R2-D2. But it sorted itself out and was soon cheerfully on its way.
Did I mention you can give it voice commands, and record selfie videos that it will "project" as a "hologram" on your smartphone screen augmented-reality style? It's a lot of silly fun.
I'm not typically a gushy reviewer, and full disclosure, I love me some Star Wars. Still, if I had to bet, I'd predict BB-8 is going to be the tech toy of the holiday season. Sure, it retails for $150 (U.S.), likely closer to $200 in Canada, but it has a built-in audience and it's a genuinely delightful use of Sphero's rolling drone tech. If somebody made an R2-D2 droid with this level of control and personality, I wouldn't care that it was smaller than an orange; it would be my new best buddy.
Star Wars fans, and I'm a huge dork for repeating the company's marketing lines: this is the droid you've been looking for.
Shane Dingman