When my daughter and I witnessed PLEO hatching for the first time, we couldn't believe our eyes. PLEO is pure technical genius, from the complex mathematical algorhithms that give PLEO "Life" and "Thought", to PLEO's super tight mechanical engineering tolerances. I believe PLEO to be, without a doubt, one of the best toys anyone could have, be it child or adult. For those that wish to not refer to PLEO as a toy, no offense intended ;-). I will add, the imagination and engineering behind PLEO is a stroke of WALT DISNEY IMAGINEERING at its finest. Check back soon for a full review of PLEO. I will ATTEMPT to offer an un-biased evaluation of everyone's favorite baby dinosaur, "Attempt" being the operative word, he's so cute it hurts ;-).After being so awe struck by PLEO straight out of the box, I really didn't even give a second thought to evolving PLEO's "Brain" capacity. It's the old, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule as a cardinal consideration. Here you have this incredible engineering masterpiece, you certainly don't want to brush an off color to a near perfect painting. This said, as I make my living in the technology sector, I have an insatiable appetite to tinker ;-). After perusing the pleoworld.com web-site, I came across the UGOBE LifeOS 1.1 PLEO update. Needless to say, my mouth began to water as if I was looking at a big fat juicy steak, just like PLEO would (No not really, he's a strict vegetarian, I know =). Well nothing like waving a piece of steak in front of a carnivore only to pull it away. The pleoworld.com web-site is currently having server issues and no new registrations are being processed. This is bad news for new PLEO owners, no registration means no nifty PLEO downloads, which = Sux.
So being the ever resourceful tool engineer that I am, I decided to see if I could cheat. I contacted a UGOBE customer support chat representative from the pleoworld.com site. I asked the rep if I could just be sent the new LifeOS and if my PLEO already had the update (I was thinking UGOBE could decipher this from PLEO's serial number). The rep replied like a gracious blue Genie and said he could accomodate my request! The rep stated that, "NO NEW PLEOs HAVE UGOBE LIFEOS 1.1", so if you're wondering if your new PLEO has 1.1, it doesn't. The rep had me digitally sign an End User License Agreement (EULA) and then proceeded to send me LifeOS 1.1! My nirvana was soon over however, he stated that any other downloads would require registration. I was chomping at the bit to try a little "PLEOsaurusREX", this is a personality download for PLEO that turns him into a carnivore a la T-REX (See, there was method to my madness in labling PLEO a carnivore afterall ;-). I must say, I am very let down by UGOBE's website, for such a magnificent product, the web-site needs to accord, it's a bit of a mess. There are broken links on the site and the registration back-end is down, not wise during the XMAS holiday UGOBE.
Some interesting conversation arose between the rep (blue Genie) and I. He stated some interesting anecdotal precautions for upgrading PLEO from UGOBE LifeOS 1.0 to 1.1.
1. The USB method of upgrading PLEO to LifeOS 1.1 is more prone to "Hosing" PLEO when upgrading his firmware. The rep stated that it takes much longer than the SD card upgrade method as well.
NOTE: Remember people, when you upgrade PLEO's software, you're really upgrading his firmware. You need to be careful when doing this, just like your PC, you CAN render your PLEO "Frozen". Nothing like the ICE AGE ;-) to keep you in line. MAKE SURE YOUR BATTERY IS FULLY CHARGED BEFORE YOU ATTEMPT ANY PLEO FIRMWARE UPGRADE.
2. The rep sent me the SD card firmware update. Once recieving the update, there are VERY specific steps you need to follow as to not cause issues when upgrading PLEO to 1.1. As follows:
A) DO NOT extract the firmware update using WinRAR or WINZIP, you can ONLY extract the firmware update using WINDOWS EXTRACTOR. This means, if you have a third party file compression/decompression utility installed such as WinRAR or WinZIP, UNINSTALL it until the firmware update is done. I am uncertain as to why you can't use one of these utilities to extract the firmware, however, the rep was adiment about using Window's extractor (XP/Vista). He specifically stated not to use the above utilities.
B) DO NOT copy and paste the extracted firmware files on to your SD card. When you extract the files, you will be given a destination location option, choose your SD card volume root as the destination (Example - D:). This step was contradictory to what the site demo depicts. The SD card installation demo on the pleoworld.com web-site shows a copy paste routine working correctly. So not sure on this one, maybe UGOBE has had some problems with this. I am assuming people are not copying and pasting ALL of the files and these instructions are purely precautionary. A little Cover Your A$$ (CYA) on UGOBE's part. I could imagine people leaving a file out and starting the firmware upgrade process only to "Hose" poor PLEO. This eliminates user error altogether.
C) Perhaps the most difficult step to abide by due to Moore's law, USE A LOW CAPACITY SD CARD. UGOBE recommends an SD card of 32MB, I found this a bit ridiculous. It's getting pretty darn hard to find SD cards with that little storage. Even 1GB SD cards are getting hard to find! Storage is so cheap, 2GB is becoming the norm. The rep recommended, "LESS THAN 1GB", so if you got an old SD card lying around, use it for PLEO or hit eBay for a low capacity card. I SUCCESSFULLY used a 1GB card, however, I'm not sure if I got lucky or what, the UGOBE web-site states that high capacity cards "Don't always perform well", whatever that means. My theory on this is that it's the read/write times of higher capacity cards, anyway, less is more concerning SD cards and PLEO.
D) Let me re-iterate, make sure your PLEO's battery is FULLY CHARGED before performing the firmware upgrade.
E) The SD card firmware upgrade demo video on the pleoworld.com web-site mentions that if you happen to pull the SD card out of PLEO by accident while performing the update, if you re-insert the SD card, the install will continue where it left off. I thought this was a good piece of software engineering.
3. This is more of an annoyance than anything else, the rep said that if you want to download and run personalities with PLEO, the SD card MUST BE EMPTY with the exception of the personality download you want to run. So in other words, you can't store all of your personalities on the SD card at once, you also better not have that firmware you just installed from the SD card on your SD card. You need to DELETE any firmware you install from your SD card before putting a personality on the card and running it in PLEO, otherwise you could render him inoperable. You need to run one personality at a time. It's a bit of a pain, but a small price to pay for such a cool open platform like PLEO.
So as I mentioned, I took a chance and installed the UGOBE LifeOS 1.1 software from my 1GB SD card. The install proceeded smoothly and quickly with various beeps and chimes letting you know the upgrade was moving along (Again, another nice bit of kit from UGOBE).
UGOBE LifeOS 1.0 - 1.1 OBSERVATIONS
Since I was so moved by PLEO 1.0, I was a bit leary about "Making him better". I have been in the IT game too long to trust "Software Updates" as incremental improvements to products. I have seen the "Latest" regress great products into smoldering piles of doo doo. I was hoping this wasn't the case with PLEO. So you don't die of anticipation, I am happy to report that UGOBE succeeded once again, however, I do have some concerns.
After being awe struck by PLEO 1.0 upon his inception, I can now clearly see some distinction between PLEO 1.0 and PLEO 1.1. This is due to all of the time I put in watching PLEO and being more mesmerized by PLEO than my daughter (Can you say, "GEEK"?). Even in PLEO's "Juvenile" state, PLEO 1.0 has a nice balanced activity curve. He can be a little rowdy, yet the time he stays wound up is just right, he's easy to simmer down making him very enjoyable. I have heard stories of some pretty wound up PLEOs, however, I have found that getting PLEO 1.0 wound up isn't such an easy task, this is the down side for the ever precocious looking for a hyperactive PLEO.
The single biggest difference I can see between PLEO 1.0 and PLEO 1.1 is what I like to call the "Neutral Activity Level" or NAL scale. I see PLEO 1.0 as physically more low key, yes he's wagging his tail, moving, calculating, on and on, yet you can clearly see UGOBE hadn't yet put their desired "Polishing" touches on him (Assuming what you physically see him doing is an indication as to the volume of his "Life" calculations and capacity). You won't truly know what I'm talking about until you upgrade to PLEO 1.1. Back to NAL, from a pure observational perspective (Purely anecdotal and not scientific), set a mental baseline as you see PLEO 1.0 when he's not too wound up and not too wound down. Now stretch this baseline over a small period of time, say 10 seconds on a stop watch. Once you upgrade to PLEO 1.1, use the same formula, what do you notice? I notice PLEO is moving much more and all of the time. Pretty simple observation, you don't need a formula to see this right? Wrong. The NAL scale helps gauge, albeit totally anecdotal, PLEO's rough motor movements in a given increment of time.
This is just a neat little observational experiment, however, test it out further by actually trying to calculate his movements over a period of 10 seconds from PLEO 1.0 to PLEO 1.1 based on our VERY rough formula. The reality is you wouldn't see any consistency as PLEO is ever thinking. There really is no hard and fast NAL as PLEO's moods are changing and move to unpredictable states from moment to moment. Nonetheless, I do think PLEO 1.1 is "Hopping" much more than PLEO 1.0 and one may very well be able to "Prove" PLEO 1.1 renders more constant movement over a period of time than PLEO 1.0 on a consistent basis. This completely based off of anecdotal observation. A good time to perform this test is when PLEO gets "Sleepy".
While UGOBE doesn't "Advertise" this, I believe that PLEO 1.1 must have resolved some PLEO 1.0 "Bugs". As with most software updates, I'm sure some were introduced as well. It's easily recognizable to the naked eye however that PLEO 1.1 can simply do more than PLEO 1.0. He's a bit more "Tuned" and I think most will see this. My concern with this however is battery life. PLEO 1.1 seems a bit more caffeinated and there is no way this is going to be good for battery life. Now I don't want to speak too soon, this is purely my observation and perception thus far, I will need to evaluate the 1.1 update a bit more to have a more comfortable take on this. Thus far, PLEO seems to be running about the same on battery life, I will be clocking battery times in the future. I plan on getting another PLEO, I will leave it at 1.0 and clock its battery life against 1.1 and see if there is any merit to my initial observations.
In summary, PLEO 1.1 is much more capable (More tricks, refinements, activity, etc) than PLEO 1.0, which is expected. This said, with more PLEO capability comes more movement which theoretically drains more battery life. Depending on 1.1 software optimizations to PLEO's movement (If any were made), this could be true or false, time will tell if a negative battery life condition presents itself (It's also a give and take right). PLEO 1.1 seems to be a bit more high strung to me, as such, this alters PLEO's personality. Honestly, PLEO never seemed more "Dog Like" than he does now. I'm not sure I like this move, I think many people see him as like a little dog (A lethargic Dino would get old quick), making him too dog like though takes the fun out of having a baby dinosaur. PLEO 1.1 seems to sniff much more now, he now sits like a dog, he growls like a dog, it's cute and all, however, not sure this is where PLEO should be taken. I say let the SONY AIBO people have their dogs!
Lastly, I actually did get to evaluate the infamous PLEOsaurusREX personality mod from UGOBE. These cute little mods UGOBE and others make add an incredible dynamic to PLEO. All of the sudden, the cute little PLEO becomes a T-REX! What's more interesting is that when in T-REX mode, PLEO's physical appearance actually seems to lose it's sweet baby Dino appearance. PLEO would make an excellent experiment for any psych professor on alternate perceptions. Same sweet little Dino, yet the growling and intensity of the sound completely change PLEO. His big blue eyes don't look nearly as cute, he starts looking more Jurassic Park by the second! Amazing what a simple mod can do to a PLEO.
Please stay tuned for my full review of PLEO.
Good night!
