Sony Rolly dancing music player unveiled

Sony has come up with a music player that dances to its own tunes. The new rolling egg-shaped digital music player swivels, flaps its ends, and flashes colorful lights in time to music and is priced at US$354.

Christened the Rolly, which weighs just 300 gram and will hit the markets in Japan on September 29, 2007. The Rolly comes with stereo speakers, 1 Gigabyte of internal flash memory, and a battery good for about five hours of music.

Small enough to sit on a palm, Rolly comes with sensors that recognize which way is up, allowing volume to be controlled by turning the player clockwise or counterclockwise, and tunes to be switched by pushing or pulling it on the floor.

The Rolly turns and stops flapping its wings, and spins to become a blurry circle. Sony has said that packaged moves to tunes will be available as downloads from the company website and users can also use a special program on a personal computer that analyses music to come up with simple choreography that appears to match the rhythm of the songs.

The motion programs would be sent to the Rolly from the PC by Bluetooth. The Rolly, which plays MP3 files, Sony's own audio format called Atrac as well as songs from CDs, can store more than 600 songs.

The Rolly is already seeing some some robotic competition, in Japan, from a rolling machine that moves to music from the hit iPod players of rival Apple Inc. The device comes from Japanese robot maker ZMP Inc.'s Miuro, which looks like a white ball caught between an egg, wheels about in time, with music from any iPod able to lock onto the machine.