Nabaztag

Is there no end to progress? This rabbit can function in 32 languages, it picks up information from the web even when your computer is turned off, it doesn’t have strict working hours or bad moods, and it doesn’t ask to be paid. You are all it cares about.

To start your day, it can tell you it loves you or sing “Don’t worry be happy”, remind you it’s your godson’s birthday, or tell you not to go out without your umbrella as it’s going to rain. Just like Nanny. It is even capable of reminding your teenage daughter to pick up her brother from school. How? If you put it by your front door, it can tell your daughter has come home when she hangs up her keys, and it knows it needs to shout! True, it doesn’t have the pleasantest of voices, it’s mechanical and frankly rather annoying. You’d do better to stick to the flashing lights and moving ears. Be warned, though, you need to learn to decode what your little "friend" is trying to tell you. Don’t, for example, lose out on the stock market by selling shares because you misinterpreted the flashing lights as meaning the market was up when it’s down. The rabbit can lead you to get things wrong – just like any couple, you can have problems communicating. But it’s worse than that: after a while it will simply start to get on your nerves. Not that you’d go so far as to take it out in the car and abandon it by the roadside, or anything like that, but it would be nice to be able to remove it like a friend on Facebook. After all, you might not want to know what the boss says in her latest email, or be told that it’s going to rain today or that your shares are down. And so what if you forget your godson’s birthday, it saves you money. Perhaps we should leave the rabbit to the perfectionists out there: the news junkies, the supermums and workaholics – that’s a fair number already. We’re happy enough to be subservient to our iPhones and Blackberries, without another device to hang round our necks!