SONY'S ROLLY ROLLS INTO THE U.S.

SAN DIEGO, May 20, 2008 - For those who want to experience music through movement, Sony's Rolly entertainment player, a palm-sized, egg-shaped device that rolls and spins like it's dancing to the music, is now available at Sony Style retail stores nationwide.

Spawned from Sony portable audio technology and innovations in artificial intelligence, along with the company's design and entertainment legacy, this device provides a unique combination of music, motion and fun.

"Rolly has the ability to attract your attention as soon as you turn it on," said Brennan Mullin, vice president of marketing for audio at Sony Electronics. "It's a tremendous example of what can happen when entertainment and technology merge."

Clear Sound by Sony's Audio Technologies

Made for producing superb audio quality, Rolly features 180-degree, horizontally opposed stereo speakers. As a result, listeners can enjoy high quality sound from nearly anywhere in the room.

Sound reverberates from the surface the device is placed on, whether on a desk or on the floor. With a digital amp for high sound quality and speakers with neodymium magnets, powerful audio performance is delivered from the compact unit.

Rolly Brings Music to Life

With built-in robotic technologies, the device is designed to move its small arms, shoulders and wheels—six moving parts—to the beat of the music. With about 700 colors in its repertoire, lighting adds to the impact of the motion.

The Rolly device comes with choreography for three songs: "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (theme from "2001 - A Space Odyssey"), Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" and Earth Wind and Fire's "Boogie Wonderland." It can be powered up to play music and dance immediately right out of the box. Two additional tracks have been included to demonstrate how motion can be integrated into the listening experience.

Bringing out the Inner Choreographer

To choreograph an original routine, the unit comes with Rolly Choreographer software. Motions can either be created automatically by the software for a specific song, or for a creative twist, you can create customized choreography for your favorite music. Once choreography has been created, the software simulates how the device will move so you can preview the dance moves on a PC before transferring the routine to the unit.

After creating original dance routine programs, users can share choreography with others in the Rolly Go forum. Using the choreographer software, motion files can be uploaded or downloaded online from this site. Found at www.sonystyle.com/rolly, click on the Rolly Go icon to access the community and see what others have created.

Designed for Motion

The device's simple, clean, cable-less design lets it move freely on smooth surfaces. It is easy to change songs or control the volume by turning the wheels while the unit is on a surface or holding it in your hand. Shaking the device switches its music play to shuffle mode.

The player also contains Bluetooth® technology for wirelessly streaming music from a compatible PC or mobile phone.

Tiny Flash Entertainer

With 2GB flash memory, the player can store up to 520 songs for songs of an average of four minutes in length at 128kbps in the MP3 format. The battery life allows up to five hours of music playback and up to four hours of music and motion together on a single charge. The player supports non-secure AAC and MP3 formats.

Dance Off

Sony's Rolly entertainment player and Grammy™ -nominated R&B singer/dancer, Omarion, have teamed up for a dance off between man and machine. Omarion is known for his dance style and choreography that blends popping, locking, waving and break dance movement. You will soon be able to watch a dance off between the device and Omarion at www.sony.com/rolly.

Availability

The Rolly device comes in black and white and is available online at www.sonystyle.com/rolly and at Sony Style stores for about $400.

As well as playing music, the Murider's 4.3-inch LED screen lets you watch movies or DMB mobile TV, and check your photos. it charges via USB and gives you between three and four hours' worth of power, depending on what function you're using. Although it doesn't make clear whether there is any internal memory, you can load stuff via an SD card slot or its USB.

As well as spinning around, the Murider comes running when you summon it using the call button on the remote control, and you can get it to light up in time to the music. The unit will be available in Korea before Christmas in either black or white, and is said to be priced more competitively than the Rolly. [New Launches and Engadget]

Microdisplay TVs are down 70%, but the fabulously floaty 70-inch SXRD is on target for its revised (that is, delayed) early December shipdate. No price change, but my guess is that the $6,000 tag will be slashed at some point. Says Vandenbree: "As long as people shop on cost per inch, microdisplay has a home."

Will flat-panel pricing erosion be major for this holiday season? Smaller screen sizes won't see much in the way of price drops, but in the larger screen sizes, 46" and 52" in particular, there will be drops.

Is Sony concerned with BD Profile 1.1 Blu-ray players from Samsung and Panasonic? "The important thing is the features. Performance doesn't improve with 1.1," says Glasgow, adding "The important thing is what studios are doing to add capability. 1.1 is just the beginning." He confirmed that not every Blu-ray feature can be upgraded via firmware, as we knew.

The HD DVD-Blu-ray Format War: "The war is continuing to rage. We're still in the middle. There's a lot more that can be done. Let me say this: there are 170 companies [in the Blu-ray camp] against two companies [in the HD DVD camp]. I find some abnormality in that. Let's leave it at that." He looks forward to more "performance" on Blu-ray, with increased studio involvement.

The new Sony Reader will get PDF support in January.

The Reader is finding an audience among the military, among companies who want to load up manuals for employees, and among housewives. Educational publishers are still slow to see its value: "They are probably a little old fashioned—probably not the right thing to say—but they are a little slow to adapt," says Glasgow, adding that he thinks they will get on track. Sony welcomes the Amazon reader and any other competition as "publicity for the category."

On Apple's success in the laptop business: "We have different sizes, weights [than Apple], and we're using different materials," says Glasgow, welcoming Apple's sales boost and saying it doesn't affect the Vaio division's competition. "This could be the best year in the history of Vaio. We're not in this to have 40% market share, we're here to continue to innovate and use that expertise to help us in consumer electronics." He mentioned that Leopard has problems of its own, though the crowd laughed (implying Vista problems of greater severity.)

On recent better-than-expected sales in the flash-memory music and video player (aka iPod nano) market: "We can't keep them on the shelf," says Vandenbree, saying the new players did better in walk-in brick-and-mortar sales, where people can see the products. "We'll take a bite out of Apple," says Glasgow. "We learned more about what to do right. I'm more frustrated than you that it took so long."

[Sony Electronics Official Blog]

The Rolly is motion-controlled, having sensors that know which way is up. You can fiddle with the volume by turning the player clockwise or anti-clockwise, and you can skip or repeat tracks by either rolling the player forwards or backwards, or shaking it. You can download dance moves to the Rolly, but there will also be software available to allow you to make up your own Rolly moves on your computer.

At $351, the Rolly is around three times cheaper than the Miuro, and it gives you the lumi re to go with the son, but there's something a bit pedestrian about Sony's design, IMHO. Other "Mmmmmm... No!" features include a titchy 1GB memory, although you can hook it up via Bluetooth to play tunes from your computer. Incidentally, you get five hours of battery time using the internal memory, and four and a half if you use Bluetooth.

To add insult to injury, Sony is selling the carrying case and charging cradle separately, for $17.50 and $35 respectively. I can't decide whether I think that Sony will roll this product out worldwide or not, but I would have thought it would sell well everywhere. [Impress through Google Translate]

After some arm twisting from website Digital Lifestyle, Sony brass admits that, yes, it's a digital media player, and they want us to think about it as a "music-focused Wii on wheels." You know a product idea's already in trouble when its company officials refer to their competitors when trying to describe it.

Here's the the teasing clues Sony is doling out bit by bit at its Rolly site, just in case reading a bunch of scrolling words is too tedious for you or might make you dizzy: small, motion, open, communication, freestyle, chill, lucky, abstraction, peace, shuffle, share, music, kurukuru. Got it? [Rolly]

One French source mentioned something about choreography, suggesting that the player could have some sort of motion-activated features on board. All we know is that an egg shape is not going to fit into the pocket very well, a subtle hint that this next attempt at domination of the music player world may be yet another stupid flop from that hapless four-letter-word outfit known as Sony. But let's reserve final judgment—we may be seeing real product by the end of the month. [Pocket Lint]