Hands on: Sony Rolly is cute, clean fun

We've written about the Sony Rolly a number of times: I finally got my hands on one (two, actually, due to a shipping error), to see what this little guy can do in the real world.

Put simply: Rolly is the strangest boom box ever made. It's much smaller than I'd thought it would be based on the pictures and videos, about the size of an oblong baseball (or a hand grenade, perhaps). Pop in the battery, charge it up via USB, install the software, and you're ready to go. Rolly gives you two gigs of space for music and battery life is rated for four to five hours.

The fun comes when you disconnect Rolly and start him spinning. Press the play button—the only button on the device aside from the power switch—and he starts playing tracks. If you've just loaded audio, Rolly's tiny speakers extend outward on hinges, and he just sits there and plays (loudly!). You can control audio settings by spinning Rolly clockwise (louder) or counterclockwise (softer). Or push him forward or back (or pick him up and just spin one of his wheels) to skip tracks forward or back. (Rolly can also stream music directly from your PC via Bluetooth, but I didn't have this available at the time to test.)

Of course, Rolly doesn't just play music. As the name implies, he also rolls. Dances, really: The speaker ears zip in and out, the lights on each side change colors, and Rolly himself can spin, rock, and roll around the room. The demo for "Also Sprach Zarathustra," preloaded on the Rolly, is pretty classic, with Rolly opening his little ears in time with rising volume of the classic opening, then spinning in place at the end, reminding one of the psychedelic finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As cool as Rolly is, the software required to use it is kind of a dud. It takes ages to load, it's horribly laid out (you can see all of three songs in the Rolly file viewer at once by default), it's terribly slow, and transferring a single song to Rolly (with automatic choreography created) can take close to a minute. You can edit the choreography by hand, but this is extremely time consuming and requires tons of trial and error... and, of course, none of this is documented. Fortunately, the auto-created choreography is often pretty imaginative. I can't imagine anyone but the hardest-core Rolly hacker spending a lot of time to tweak the dances.

Rolly is a very fun little toy. At $400 it's a little crazy to consider as anything other than a toy for the rich and bored, but I do have to confess that Rolly is infectiously fun, and the kids really love it.