I’ve always enjoyed the world of robotics. Anything from Nitro powered R/C cars to Minature remote controlled R2-D2 units I’ve always enjoyed tinkering with them . I was searching ebay not too long ago and saw quite a few of these AIBO robotic dogs for sale and was wondering if they’re anywhere near worth the money some of the sellers are asking for them. My question is… “Does anyone here own one? if so, how satisfied/dissatisfied are you with it”. 
Which of the following would you most prefer?
A) a puppy
B) a pretty flower from your sweety or
C) a large properly formated data file? CHOOSE!
Is the puppy mechanical in any way?
No, it is the bad kind of puppy.
Most likely C) a large properly formated data file? I think I’d have more fun with that one 
AIBO is, like, so four years ago.
Anyway, no, I don’t own one. However, I live in AIBO’s homeland and I have had several opportunities to interact with the critter.
Most privately-owned AIBOs I have seen were peacefully gathering dust whilst sitting atop their charger. That should tell you something. I have never, ever seen someone play with an AIBO outside of a store.
That leads to my second point: when you do play with an AIBO in a store or elsewhere, the playing gets old fast. A few minutes, tops, if you’re of the easily amused kind. They’re slow. They’re “stupid”. Or at least, they act like they are. They don’t do anything.
If the sellers are asking something like 20$ for it, I say go for it. It might be broken but that doesn’t really matter, as in the end, it’ll just sit atop its charger collecting dust.
Thanks!
I don’t know about the commercial success but these puppies (oh, gawd! that was truely horrible) have been gleefully adopted by robotics researchers in universities around the world. Every year, there is a international robot soccer tournament that uses the Aibo and my university is pretty much tops this so I see them around the place all the time. I have to say that the second generation ones look very much improved over the first gen and some of the software wizardy that university teams manage to pump out of them is simply amazing.
I’m more interested in the new humanoid robot that sony is about to put out though,
Actually, Sony had been entering them in the soccer tournaments even before they were commercially released (also before they’d been given the name Aibo). Back in the 1998 tournament, they used prototype models that didn’t have any of the later Aibo’s ‘doggy’ features.
Although the newer models are a lot more advanced (and a fair bit cheaper) than the first ones, they still don’t seem to really be able to do much of anything that the average user would find entertaining for very long, although they’re probably very good for impressing guests. If you think you’d enjoy programming it, then it may be a fun (though expensive) toy.
Qrio (Sony’s humanoid robot) looks like an incredible piece of engineering (there was a little blurb on the news a while back for Sony’s press conference announcing that they’d made the first humanoid robot that could jump), but they still don’t look like they’d be very interesting after the initial novelty wore off.
The flower would also have been acceptable.
What’s an AIBO going for now? I’m too lazy to look on eBay.