Sony's Rolly Music Player Rolls Out

After watching those Sony ROLLY demo videos a while back, I had the feeling this gadget might catch on with those who can afford to drop about $400 on device that plays and dances to music. Sony's palm-sized, and egg-shaped Rolly music entertainment player can now be the life of your party, as it rolls in to Sony Style retail stores and SonyStyle online.

Rolly is powered by a digital amp and features 180-degree, horizontally opposed stereo speakers that pump out the sound. Using its built-in robotic technologies, Rolly can move to the beat while up to 700 colors of lighting gives Rolly its own mini-lightshow. Users can choreograph a routine for Rolly using included software, but Sony gets Rolly going with pre-installed music and movements as well. If you want to get funky, Sony is having a "Dance Off " with the Rolly entertainment player and Grammy-nominated R&B singer/dancer Omarion facing each other in competition. Sounds corny, but you can catch that at http://www.sony.com/rolly soon.

 

 

The Rolly device comes with choreography for three songs: "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (theme from "2001 -- A Space Odyssey"), Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" and Earth Wind and Fire's "Boogie Wonderland." It can be powered up to play music and dance immediately right out of the box. Two additional tracks have been included to demonstrate how motion can be integrated into the listening experience.    

You can change songs or control the volume by turning Rolly's wheels, or shake Rolly to shuffle tracks, and even stream music to Rolly from your cellphone or PC via wireless Bluetooth!  The player includes 2GB of flash memory for storing around 500 MP3 songs. Battery life is said to provide up to five hours of music playback, and up to four hours of music and motion together on a single charge.