Video: Over the last few years, there’s been a trend in technology press conferences and product announcements to try and make them more human, cool, and connected to real people and reality — to give these hunks of plastic and silicon some more life and presence. Sometimes, they’re a little bit lame. Everyone is guilty of it — Samsung, Google, Samsung, or maybe Microsoft, or Blackberry, or Samsung. Now, it’s Asus’s turn.
Don’t get us wrong — the ZenBo robot looks amazing, and we’ve all dreamed of a robotic home assistant to go and answer the door and fold the washing and feed the cat. But while this 11-minute video for Asus’s “little smart companion” is fun and does demonstrate the many and varied ways in which a giant tablet on wheels would be useful, it’s also very stiffly acted out and somehow makes this robot from the future actually seem a bit quaint and archaic.
We still want one, though. [YouTube]