Sony Rolly Plays Tunes, Spins, Is Cute!

The consumer tech juggernaut that brought you the Aibo just took the wraps off its latest...um...musical companion, I guess you'd call it. Looking like a little plastic barrel with glowing blue lights, flapping dome-shaped ears, and an unquenchable desire to perform your favorite music, the Sony Rolly is here, and it's ready to party.

Engadget has a full photo gallery and a video of Sony Japan's Rolly, a.k.a. the SEP-10BT "Sound Entertainment Player," and it's...well...unique. The wireless, egg-shaped pipsqueak rolls, spins, and jigs on command, its little "ears" opening and closing, LEDs flashing, all to the beat of whatever MP3s, AACs, or ATRAC (Sony's favorite, all-but-dead music format) you see fit to play on it. The Engadget video shows a little girl and her mom giggling along with the Rolly's gyrations, while a caption reads, "It's so cute!"—which must, I think, be the point. You'll also be able to program the Rolly to perform your own custom dance routines, which you can then share over the Interwebs. Amazing, what they can do these days.

Anyway, the Rolly (complete with Bluetooth music streaming and 1GB of internal memory) will begin strutting its stuff in Japan on September 29, for about 40,000 yen (equivalent to US$350 or so). No word on a U.S. release date yet—and for that, we should probably be grateful.

Related:
Sony's Rolly gets official, yet we still don't really get it [Engadget]