CHIBA, Japan--One of the most popular exhibits at Ceatec this year is Rolly, a dancing egg from Sony.
Music gets fed into Rolly, and it responds by "dancing" to the music. It will roll, spin around rapidly, or flip open its top as the music changes. A $300 device with a couple of LED lights that gyrates to Ricky Martin tunes? It doesn't sound like a hot seller on paper, but it's a huge hit at the show, taking place outside of Tokyo this week. Sony showed it off earlier this year and has just begun to sell it.
The Japanese technology giant also showed off its organic light emitting diode (OLED) TVs that will start to go on sale in Japan on December 1. The TVs measure only 11 inches in diameter, but they are wafer thin and consume only a small amount of energy. The OLED TV that will go on sale will also last 30,000 hours, according to a Sony representative. That's good, considering that one of the big beefs about OLED TVs is the short lifespan.
Still, the 11-inch size makes it smaller than most TVs, or laptop screens for that matter, on the market. Sony showed off larger prototypes at the Consumer Electronics Show last January (and showed off one here) but it has not committed to coming out with larger models yet. Some sources have speculated that the small size has something to do with manufacturing yields of the larger versions.