Joe Maring / Digital Trends
This past January, a company named Rabbit took CES 2024 by storm. Rabbit used CES to announce its new gadget — the Rabbit R1 — and it was immediately captivating. With a retro design, bright orange paint job, and an adorable rabbit logo, it was hard not to be excited about the R1 … even if it wasn’t immediately clear what exactly it was supposed to do.

Contents

• What the Rabbit R1 is supposed to do
• The Rabbit R1 works well … until it doesn’t
• So many missing features
• My journey with the R1 continues

I’ve now spent the past four days living with the Rabbit R1. While I adore its design, its unapologetically orange color, and the bouncing rabbit on its display, almost everything else about the R1 has been, to put it nicely, a mess.

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What the Rabbit R1 is supposed to do

Joe Maring / Digital Trends
The Rabbit R1 isn’t a smartphone, and it isn’t attempting to replace your smartphone (despite the original press release suggesting that it would). Instead, the best way to think about the Rabbit R1 is as a companion device to your phone.

The pitch behind the Rabbit R1 is for it to be “the simplest computer” at your disposal. You press the button on the side of the Rabbit R1, ask a question/give it a command, and that’s the extent of how you get things done. There aren’t any apps to juggle, confusing menus to navigate through, etc. You hold down a button, talk, and the Rabbit R1 takes care of it.

The Rabbit R1 is supposed to be “the simplest computer” at your disposal.

The idea is that you can ask the Rabbit R1 just about anything. What’s the stock price of Apple? Who played the lead role in “Oppenheimer”? What’s the weather like today? What’s a 25% tip for a $65 bill? Any random questions that come to you throughout the day, the Rabbit R1 is supposed to handle.

Where the Rabbit R1 gets really exciting (at least in theory) is its “Connections” feature. In short, you can connect your logins to various apps/services to your Rabbit account, allowing the R1 to do things in these apps on your behalf. Again, all this is done using just your voice. From ordering food on DoorDash to calling an Uber to playing a Spotify playlist, Rabbit wants the R1 to do it all in a faster, simpler way than what’s possible on your phone.

The Rabbit R1 is supposed to be able to handle just about anything you throw at it. It can provide information on stocks, answer questions about movies, tell you the weather, and even help with things like tipping and making restaurant reservations. It’s all about offering a streamlined and user-friendly experience.

However, in practice, there are some areas where the Rabbit R1 falls short. For basic questions that you might typically search for on your phone, it can be quite helpful. It can give accurate answers for things like NFL draft picks and movie release dates. But when it comes to more complex queries or tasks that require more finesse, it sometimes struggles.

For example, asking the Rabbit R1 about the weather can sometimes yield hilarious and inaccurate results. It might correctly tell you the current weather for your city one day, but then switch to a completely different location the next. There’s also no way to manually set your location, which can be a major inconvenience. And trying to use the R1 for tasks like setting alarms or timers is a bit cumbersome as it doesn’t have those built-in features right now.

Despite these limitations, the potential of the Rabbit R1 is still there. It’s clear that Rabbit has big ideas and is aiming to create a unique and useful device. But they need to work on ironing out the kinks and adding more functionality to make it truly stand out in the crowded tech market.

The Rabbit R1 has the potential to be a great companion device, but it needs to improve its accuracy and expand its capabilities to live up to its promise. Only time will tell if it can overcome the challenges and become a must-have gadget for many.