The Sega iDog may not be quite as advanced as Sony's Aibo but then it's under £30 compared to the £1100+ you can spend on an Aibo. However that massive gap in price does not mean your iDog is devoid of features, far from it. In fact the i-Dog was one of the top selling Christmas gifts of 2005 with its unique combination of geeky technological wizardry and  cut style that will even have your girlfriend cooing over it.

The small box that the iDog ships in looks very eastern and opening it and being confronted by instructions in Japanese only was a bit of a shock, but we soon managed to locate some English ones with a quick Google. All we needed to do was to insert 3 AAA batteries into the chest of our little K9 (which needs a small Phillips screwdriver) and our iDog chirped into life. Sega's puppy has 3 main ways of communicating with its owner, firstly the dogs face lights up in a bright pattern of LED's of varying colours and shapes, then it not only chirps but can play whole tunes and lastly it moves its head and ears.

When you first fire up your new i-Dog it is a blank canvass a newborn as they term it, this means it has not yet former its personality and can be trained to behave the way you want. A new iDog starts quite happy, you can tell the level of content ness by the colour and speed of lights on it's nose, Green is happy, orange less so and red unhappy. Plus the lights circle round faster if the iDog is playful and slower if he is resting.

Interacting with the Sega puppy is simple enough, he has a button on the end of his nose and two on the top of his head, plus you can twiddle his tail to get other reactions. The iDog loves to be touched and this is one of the main ways to keep him happy, the nose button can be used to pet him and to trigger bursts of musical and light displays, the head buttons have more of a calming influence. There are also a number of pre programmed moves that holding buttons for longer periods can trigger, for example holding the head buttons makes the i-Dog run though his repertoire of 10 songs.

As with any new born you need to feed this techno puppy, but his food of choice is sound or to be more precise music. There are two methods of feeding the i-Pooch firstly he has an inbuilt microphone so placing him near a source of music means he can lap up some tunes, you can tell he's happy with this by how his lights pulsate and the colour, plus when he's had his fill he'll play "little green jug" to let you know that's enough. The second method is to use the iDog as an MP3 speaker system, by hooking your iPod (or other digital audio player) to the 3.5mm jack socket in the pooches hind leg.

Playing some music to the iDog makes him dance to the beat with a shake of the head and flap of the ears, the speaker isn't that loud but enough to hear the track, quality is pretty poor and the sound of the robotics is almost as loud as the audio reproduction. Luckily Sega do not promote the ipooch on the basis of it being an MP3 speaker system so we can forgive the audio playback as a gimmick and a pretty cool one at that.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and the i-Dog is quick to flatter as it switches to mimic mode, speak to your i-Dog for a few seconds and the centre light on his nose switches first blue and then red to indicate he is listening. Then he proceeds to mimic you in a rather unintelligible electro dog language and with a shake of the head, but listen carefully and you can detect some elements of your words in the pace and beat of his response.

The Sega iDog is really a bit of a novelty but one which any techie will love, it's the lower end of robotics and by no means a Sony Aibo, but for under £30 you do get a relatively complex e pet which responds to music and will be the centre of attention.

Published - 04/01/2006

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