It’s been just over a year since we first heard about Orbotix’s little smartphone-controlled cue ball named Sphero, and since that time, we’ve seen a couple of pre-production units strut their stuff. Apparently, we weren’t the only folks left intrigued — there were so many folks wanting one that production capacity couldn’t meet demand. So, while the company can’t deliver every pre-ordered orb by its initial December delivery date, the first few Spheros are going out today and will be in the hands of some owners by the end of the week.

Setting up Sphero is fairly simple. In its clear plastic box, you’ll find an alabaster orb, a blue induction charging base and the power cord. Plug the base into a wall outlet, set Sphero in the cradle and a blue LED will light up to let you know the power is flowing. The ball takes about three hours to fully charge if it’s out of juice, and the company claims that gives you over an hour of playtime. Once it’s topped off with power, you simply shake Sphero to turn it on and pair it to your iOS or Android device via Bluetooth using any of Sphero’s various apps. One niggle: most of the time it took at least two or three attempts (and a couple of times it took six tries) to pair Sphero with our handset regardless of which app we were attempting to use.

In our experience, we found the quoted battery life to be pretty accurate, as it rolled around for at least an hour and 11 minutes per charge during our testing. We should mention that time was accumulated over the course of several stints of playing with the ball, as opposed to one marathon play session.

Source: engadget

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