Run Robbie, Run

Every so often I make a purchase that others seem bemused or laugh at, but which comes to prove invaluable in day to day life. Possibly one of the most notable of these was the TiVo which has turned out to be an superb little box of tricks.

There appears to be a pattern with my discoveries, they tend to come from the states where they are very successful, but when launched over here in good old Blighty they receive little advertising and don’t sell well, being eventually pulled from the limited space on store shelves they managed to muscle in on. And so it is with my Roomba robotic vacuum from iRobot.

When I got mine just over a year ago I had to order it from a bloke in the US of A via eBay. People laughed, but when it arrived it proved to do an excellent job and has been an incredibly useful gadget ever since, the only down side being that it’s so interesting to watch that each time I set it off I tend to spend a while watching it before pulling myself away to do something more useful.

My mum watched the Roomba (known as Robbie – or rather Roberta since it does a woman’s work 😉 ) and wanted one. She has bad Arthritis so this was actually an ideal gadget for her since pushing an upright around or lugging a cylinder takes its toll. At the time Argos started selling them in their stores for £399, not cheap compared to the American price, but what can you do?

Now however Argos seems to have stopped selling them, and can you blame them, I doubt many people bought one. When have you ever seen an advert for these things on UK TV or in the papers? The sad fact is people just don’t know what they are, all they see is a small vacuum cleaner at an extremely high price. For that money you want something the size of a small car, not a box less than 4 inches high! Hell, I wouldn’t have looked twice if I hadn’t known what it was.

So, like the TiVo it’s possibly another missed opportunity, but then I guess the size of the market over here was never going to warrant too much attention from the parent companies.

At least the TiVo boys managed to get their technology in the Sky+ boxes, and we all know how the associated advertising has helped them fly off the shelves.

You can see videos of Robbie in action here:

  Hi-Res | Lo-Res

See how he avoids falling down the stairs. There’s no wires there, it has under body sensors. By criss-crossing through rooms it gets most (if not all) of the floor covered, and if it does miss a bit it will probably get it the next time you set it off (the idea being you can set it off more often than you’d do the vacuuming manually since it takes up little of your time), or failing that you can target areas with the remote control.

My advice: if you get the chance, get one.