It would seem that technology enables us to get lazier and lazier with each passing day. Just in case you’re not in the mood for carrying your own baggage, the Budgee rolling robot can get that off your chest.
Developed by 5 Elements Robotics and unveiled these days at CES, Budgee is a robot that’s programmed to do one task, and one task only: let you walk freely even when you have shopped for hours. The developers of this rolling robot did not get discouraged by the failure that was their Kickstarter campaign from back in February, and looked for funding somewhere else, promising that it would start delivering Budgee in December of last year or at latest, this January.
I think that Budgee is more appropriate for shopping than for carrying luggage at the airport. Right after parking your car, you can unload Budgee and strap the device that controls the distance between you and it to your belt. After doing so, the robot will maintain that distance, meaning that at no point will he invade your personal space. However, as demonstrated by The Verge‘s Ben Popper at CES, Budgee is sometimes shy and does not follow you as it should.
People who have learned about this robot’s existence fear that someone else could grab their luggage while it’s being carried by Budgee. I assume that 5 Elements Robotics have taken some security measures to ensure that the bags are strapped properly to the robot and that no one else can get them. It wouldn’t harm if the developers also taught Budgee a few martial arts moves.
5 Elements Robotics claims that its robot can be used both indoors and outdoors, but I don’t think it’s really good as a travel companion. What do you do with it at the airport or at the train station, after you no longer need it? I admit that it would be interesting if airports would pack some of these to help travelers carry their heavy cases over short distances
One thing that Budgee is missing (besides accuracy) is the ability to climb stairs. I believe that a stair-climbing tracked robot with some storage capacity would be more appropriate for carrying your luggage.
If you’re too lazy to carry your own bags, you can get Budgee for $1,400, which really isn’t that much in terms of modern robots. But just before you do that, take a look at the above video and see if it’s really worth it.
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Considering how much better desktop graphics cards are compared to their mobile counterparts, gaming notebook manufacturers are now focusing on creating GPU enclosures that deliver desktop performance on a mobile platform.
Just launched at CES, the MSI GS30 is a 13″ FHD gaming notebook, but judging a mobile device by its size is not relevant anymore, these days. Whereas a few years ago gamers thought that the bigger the laptop display, the better they can play, nowadays a 13 or 14-inch gaming notebook is more than they need. MSI’s latest is already a very capable device in its own right, packing an integrated Iris Pro 5200 graphics processor, a Core i7-4870HQ CPU, 16GB DDR3 RAM clocked at 1600Mhz, and a pair of 128GB SSDs in RAID 0 configuration. The gaming dock that’s bundled with it only makes it better.
The GPU enclosure made by MSI can host graphics cards of up to 14.3″ in length, so you’re covered for almost every model on the planet, except for the water-cooled ones. On top of that, the MSI Gaming Dock has room for a 3.5″ storage drive and a speaker to which the notebook’s audio can be routed to.
So what does the Gaming Dock have that Alienware’s Graphics Amplifier doesn’t? Well, besides the storage and the audio part, there’s the bandwidth. MSI claims that the Graphics Amplifier limits bandwidth to PCI-e 4x speed, whereas with their device, gamers can get the full performance of PCI-e 16x.
As it happens most of the time, amazing gaming accessories (if you could name the Gaming Dock that) are rarely affordable. The bundle consisting of the MSI GS30 gaming notebook and the Gaming Dock will cost north of $1,700, depending on the configuration. Bear in mind that for that money you get an empty GPU enclosure, which you will have to populate with a modern graphics card that’s worthy of being GS30′s companion. That means that you’ll have to spend extra for the GPU (and HDD, in case you want do expand the storage capacity of your laptop), but to be frank, anyone who can afford this $1,700 bundle will most likely also have the dough for a GTX980 or the like.
I’m looking forward to seeing more such GPU enclosures from other manufacturers, as well, and I have a feeling that ASUS’ Republic of Gamers line will include one in the near future.
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