An early morning with the $199 Rabbit R1

What do you actually get when you buy a bright orange $199 AI gadget? Following a launch bash at New York City's TWA Hotel, the Rabbit R1 is finally in reviewers' hands, and early impressions show a device that is equal parts charming, quirky, and visibly unfinished.

While Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu spent his keynote poking fun at the disastrous Humane AI Pin, real-world testing proves that building dedicated AI hardware is still a minefield.

A Picasso painting of a cheap smartphone

Under the hood, the Teenage Engineering-designed R1 is basically a budget Android phone scrambled into a square shell.

It measures roughly three inches on each side, weighs 115 grams (about two-thirds of an iPhone 15), and runs on a MediaTek MT6765 processor with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. It sports a 2.88-inch screen, a SIM tray, a scratchy rear speaker, and a single USB-C port, all wrapped in an unapologetic shade called luminous orange.

Instead of sitting flush on the back, the camera sits in a cutout on the right side and can physically rotate back and forth. The hardware feels less like a piece of jewelry and more like an old MP3 player crossed with a fidget spinner. The scroll wheel is a bit stiff, but the push-to-talk button feels immensely satisfying to click.

Four connected apps and a Beyoncé lullaby

Getting started requires scanning a QR code to sync with Rabbithole, the device's web portal. Right now, Rabbithole only connects to four external services: Spotify, Uber, DoorDash, and Midjourney.

Because the system relies on cloud virtual machines running your logins to interact with these services, Rabbithole feels sluggish and laggy, raising inevitable questions about credential security.

Basic conversational queries work well enough. Asking about draft picks or historical trivia returns solid answers, and having an actual screen with a listening bunny mascot makes AI latency much easier to endure than Humane's invisible projector.

Yet, the shortcomings hit quickly. When asked to play Beyoncé's new album, the R1 happily queued up a lullaby version of Crazy in Love by an outfit named Rockabye Baby. It cannot find personal playlists or skip tracks reliably. Features repeatedly demoed by Lyu, like drafting emails or creating spreadsheets, simply aren't functional yet, and the rotating camera can only catalog nearby objects without actually capturing photos or video.

Why it matters

Rabbit played its cards much smarter than Humane. At $199 with no mandatory monthly subscription, the R1 manages expectations naturally. If it stumbles, owners will laugh it off as an oddball desk toy rather than an infuriating $700 mistake.

Still, we don't think everyday users should buy one right now. The much-touted Large Action Model (LAM), meant to master apps on your behalf, currently looks like an experimental cloud wrapper that struggles with straightforward music requests.

More importantly, the R1 faces the ultimate existential barrier: almost everything it does reasonably well is already done faster on a standard smartphone. As tech giants integrate smarter on-device voice agents into mainstream mobile operating systems, the window for Rabbit to turn this funky novelty into a genuine necessity looks brutally short.