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This is what CES is all about. Forget your fancy big TVs, your Lamborghini laptops and the Bill Gates keynote. No, if everyone was truly honest with themselves, the product we’d all like to take home is this.
It’s a home cinema system in a box that just so happens to look like everyone’s favourite Star Wars character, R2-D2. Remember that bit in the first (or fourth, depending on your age) film where the cute android projects the message from bun-haired Princess Leia on the floor, while Alec Guinness and the whingeing kid look on agog? This does that.
The ‘eye’ bit at the top is the lens for a projector which, we’re told, can put out an image measuring 260 inches diagonally at 2,000 lumens. There’s a DVD player inside for watching movies along with memory card slots for displaying pics. There’s even an iPod dock, because no self-respecting do-it-all robot would be complete without one in the 21st century. There’s also an FM broadcast function, so you can send the music from your iPod dock to your hi-fi.
You can move it forwards and make him do a 360 degree turn, so expect to see plenty of dancing Artoos on YouTube.
If all this seems familiar, that’s because it featured at last year’s CES, but never actually went on sale. Nikko has tweaked the design ever so slightly and added a digital out to the back. All this Lucas-goodness won’t be cheap though — it will cost $2,700 (£1,350) when it goes on sale in March. Click on for some more details on the best toy in Las Vegas.
You hook your AV equipment up to Artoo’s arse. You can see here the all-important DVI out along with composite video, audio, USB port, digital audio out and S-Video.
As if owning your very own R2-D2 wasn’t cool enough, you get a Millennium Falcon too. This acts at the remote control — click on to see how it works.
The remote’s controls slide out. Okay, it looks like you might need a degree in engineering to work them, but when you’re dealing with an object from ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ what do you expect?
