Sony Rolly

~ the last words ~

Sony sold an egg that danced. It was about the size of a large hand, in white or black, with a wheel at each end and two cup-shaped panels that opened outward like arms. Two bands of colored LEDs ran around its middle. Put music on it and the whole assembly would spin and light up in time.

The teaser campaign started on 20 August 2007 and the product was unveiled a month later on 20 September. It went on sale in Japan on the 29th. The United States got it through the Sony Style store at US$399.99. Inside were 2 GB of flash memory and a Bluetooth radio. An accelerometer let you change tracks by standing the thing on its end and turning a wheel, or shuffle by holding it upright and shaking it.

None of this reached me and none of it reached most people. Rolly was a Japanese domestic object carrying an export price nobody was going to pay, launched in the same season as the first iPod Touch. Sony has never published a sales figure for it.

~ the record ~

~ the choreographer ~

Rolly could dance to a Bluetooth stream on its own, working the motion out live, and the results were mediocre. The better path went through a desktop application called Rolly Choreographer, which analyzed a track offline and wrote a motion file to sit beside it. The format was .mtf and it stored the movement separately from the audio, which meant a choreography was a thing you could hand to somebody else.

Sony ran a service called Rolly Go for exactly that. People uploaded and downloaded motion files for particular songs. It was a small user-generated content platform for robot dance routines, in 2007, attached to a product hardly anybody owned.

~ the price ~

US$399.99 bought you 2 GB of storage. An 8 GB iPod Nano that autumn was US$199 and an 80 GB Classic was US$249. Sony was not selling storage and knew it, but the gap was wide enough that the comparison turned up in nearly every review and made the product look absurd.

The American price came down to US$229.99. In some markets the unit shipped preloaded with Earth, Wind & Fire's "Boogie Wonderland", which is the single most Sony detail available about it. Around May 2009 it disappeared from the lineup.

~ the shape came back ~

In 2015 Sony showed the BSP60, a Bluetooth speaker with wheels and moving arms, plus an OLED display and voice commands. It was the Rolly again with eight years of newer components inside and a comparable price, and it went nowhere in a comparable way. The Verge ran a piece the following summer calling the original peak Sony, which is a compliment and a diagnosis at the same time.

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