June Wan/ZDNET
Described by testers as adorable, nostalgic, and even what could become “the iPhone of AI,” the Rabbit R1 debuted at CES 2024 as an AI-powered pocket companion that the company hopes will become your personal AI assistant. Garnering a lot of attention from both spectators and media, the Rabbit R1 launched for pre-orders with a $199 price tag, and it didn’t disappoint: The company sold 10,000 units in a single day, effectively wiping out its first batch of devices.
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“When we started building R1, we said internally that we’d be happy if we sold 500 devices on launch day,” the company posted on its X (formerly Twitter) account yesterday. “In 24 hours, we already beat that by 20x! 10,000 units on day 1!”
The first batch of pre-orders is planned to ship in late March, but potential buyers can still jump at the chance of snagging an R1 companion. Rabbit announced that a second batch of R1s is now live on its website, at the same pre-order price of $199, with orders shipping in April or May.
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The “LAM-powered Tamagotchi,” as Rabbit founder and CEO, Jesse Lyu, described the R1 on X, is a square device roughly half the size of an iPhone, but promising a more personalized experience than the $1,000 smartphone can deliver.
Capable of answering questions in natural language, the R1 can also control the apps in your phone for you by just talking to it with its push-to-talk button like a walkie-talkie. “Something so intuitive, that you don’t need to learn how to use it,” Lyu described the device during the keynote. The R1 breaks away from an app-based OS in smartphones and does what we wish Siri and Google did for us.
The Rabbit R1 features a rotating camera, push-to-talk button, analog scroll wheel, 2.88-inch touchscreen, 128GB of internal storage, SIM card slot for data, and USB-C port for charging.