I’ve just spent the past few days with the latest gadget billed as being able to take on the smartphone: the Rabbit R1.
I wanted to see if I could imagine this portable, artificial intelligence (AI) digital assistant one day becoming what my phone is now - something I can’t live without. You can see the thinking behind it: millions of people have played with AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Given that success with software, it seems the Next Big Thing for the tech giants is to do the same with hardware, and find ways to physically embed AI tools. Microsoft is doing it with laptops, while Apple is rumored to be following suit with the next iPhone. But there are also people trying to come up with an entirely new category of gadget too - which is where the R1 comes in.
Rabbit says its new device is "an intuitive companion" that can "handle everyday digital tasks". A portable AI-driven assistant that can help you as you go about your day, get you off your phone and back into the real world... you can see how that would potentially be a useful gadget. The problem though is there have already been a couple of similar products launched - and the reality has fallen well short of the hype.
Features of Rabbit R1
The Rabbit R1 is a fun bit of hardware, in an era where nothing is tactile any more, a luminous orange square with a big screen that you definitely won’t lose in your handbag. It’s got a button, a scroll wheel, and a camera which you can see move from front-to-back, making a satisfying noise as it does. And it’s affordable, priced at £159, with no subscription required.
Functionality and Performance
Well, basically, you can ask it stuff. It’s pretty limited in terms of anything else at the moment. There’s no social media, messaging, shopping, health, or banking - at least for now. You can sign in to Spotify or Apple Music accounts, but you’d want a bigger speaker than the in-built one. And, randomly, you can also use Midjourney, the AI image generator. That’s about it.
Performance Issues
We asked it about a few well-known conspiracy theories and it did not engage with them, and when I asked it who would win the next UK general election its response came from the YouGov poll of that day.
The Rabbit R1 successfully told me the time, the weather forecast, gave me the right directions to my son’s school (after I told it my location), and swiftly translated some conversation from English into German. It listed the top 20 chess players of 2024 when my partner asked it who was the best, taking the answer from a list on chess.com. But it did better than the Amazon Echo in this department - Alexa plumped for Garry Kasparov, who retired from regular competitive chess in 2005.
Concerns and Controversies
The Rabbit R1 has also faced accusations that it is essentially a glorified Android app, and tech journalist Mishaal Rahman from Android Authority even reported managing to install the tech behind it onto a Google phone. But the firm strongly denies this, saying that while there are some “unofficial emulators” around, its system is “very bespoke”.
There’s also a rather weird shadow hanging over the company behind the Rabbit R1, with allegations online that it is a former NFT company which rebranded without honoring commitments to previous investors.
Verdict
Ultimately, while it was fun to try this device out, it doesn’t yet do anything I can’t do already, either with my phone or my own eyes, and often more slowly. Others agree: it has been called "half-baked" and a device that "fails at almost everything" by reviewers.
The firm itself admits it is a work in progress. “Being an early start-up, it’s never about winning or losing - it’s all about survival," said Rabbit founder Jesse Lyu. "In some ways, I’m happy we’re getting the pushback and doubts now because it’s pushing us to make an ever-improving and better product.”
And don't expect the unflattering reviews of the R1 to stop the attempts to infuse AI into hardware. “I expect to see many more devices in this genre over the next 18 months,” says smartphone industry watcher Ben Wood, from CCS Insight. “Still, my bet is that the smartphone will transcend all these quirky products for the foreseeable future – but featuring many of the AI-powered innovations promised on stand-alone devices.”
