Sony Corp.'s new rolling egg-shaped digital music player swivels, flaps its ends and flashes colorful lights in time to music.
The ¥40,000, 300-gram Rolly, set to go on sale here Sept. 29, comes with stereo speakers, 1 gigabyte of internal flash memory and a battery good for about five hours of music. Overseas sales are still undecided.
The smooth white gadget, small enough to sit on a palm, has 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 may be a fun way to impress guests at home. Sony used a Tokyo hotel for a demonstration Monday to show how it turned and stopped like a dancing egg, flapping the lidlike parts on its ends as though it were blinking.
The Rolly also spun quickly in place until it became a blurry circle.
Preprogrammed moves to tunes will be available as downloads from a Sony Web site. But people will also be able to use a special program on a personal computer that analyzes music to come up with simple choreography that appears to match the rhythm of the songs, Sony said.
The motion programs are sent to the Rolly from the personal computer by Bluetooth. More ambitious people will be able to program original dances for their Rolly.
Sony has been building anticipation for the Rolly on its "countdown" Web site that showed youngsters dancing to loud music.