Rabbit R1: iPhone killer or gimmicky AI gadget?

The Rabbit R1, a brand new handheld 'AI' gadget was announced on 12 January this year, to excitement from some corners of the internet (and confusion from others). I preordered it the moment I heard about it. Why? My career in the software industry started fifty years ago, teaching Cobol programming for mainframe computers, and I was the second man into a startup that got venture capital to open an office in Silicon Valley all the way back in 1983. In short, I’m a veteran who needs to watch industry trends to stay competitive.

These days, I am an angel investor and Chair of the Board of Equal Care Co-op, a tech startup with ambitions to transform social care, using a tech platform to enable care to happen without bureaucracy. I own an iPhone, an iPad and a MacBook Pro. I use them all the time, but they are far too complicated and confusing. Using an app occasionally is a nightmare, because every app is slightly different. It drives me nuts just trying to find the one I need.

The pain of juggling different apps to get your work done, especially when on the go and out and about, is no doubt familiar to all creatives. At Equal Care, imagine trying to care for someone in their home and struggling to use a smartphone to keep track of your work. If you get it wrong, you might not get paid – and you could lose track of something important, such as whether somebody took their vital medication.

When I saw the Rabbit R1, I had a vision of hiding all that complexity, and talking to a walkie-talkie by pressing a button, to get my work done. Maybe that is not realistic, but it is definitely worth exploring. I have asked Rabbit if Equal Care Co-op can join their beta testing programme, when it is open, to see how we can access our tech platform through talking to an R1.

My Rabbit R1 order is in the third batch of 10,000, so it ought to arrive in May or June. Meanwhile, although my order only cost £171, I have already been given a year’s free access to the Perplexity Pro service, an offer open to the first 100,000 buyers.

So far, I love Perplexity Pro because it enables me to ask questions in plain language, and it uses the best Large Language Model to find the answer, with links to where it found them - and it is really fast. The Rabbit R1 will use it to improve its understanding of what you are asking it to do.

Perplexity Pro usually costs £200 for an annual licence, so I am already ahead on my investment. When I get my Rabbit R1, I’ll let you know how I get on with it. Until I get my hands on it and try it for real, I can’t tell whether it is an iPhone killer or a gimmicky gadget. I look forward to finding out.