Who Buys These?

Every HK Electronics Fair (I’ve been to three), CES (a lot), and CES Asia (once), I’ve come across many knock-off Jibos (maybe we call them Cheebos because they’re much cheeper). I was taken to task when I asked this question to someone based in HK… it’s everyone. Manufacturers mostly act rationally and try to create products to serve the market so it would make sense that there’s demand for these.

I’ve been asking myself what I find about these that upsets me so much? Here’s the list:

They’re slow. It seems like these are running underpowered tablets.

Low quality display. The light bleeds from the sides, the contrast is low, and the screen resolution is poor.

They’re unresponsive. The voice interaction has a high lag. The response after a command has high latency.

Low quality mics. The biggest symptom of this is end point detection in speech. You say something, finish the command, and then wait a few seconds before the end of speech is detected.

Despite these traits, people seem to fall in love with the cuteness factor. Maybe they’re buying them for family members? I’d be curious to see how long these remain plugged in and what’s the average lifespan of them.