Kids beware, smartphone-controlled racer coming through

THE hallway in our home turned into a makeshift drag strip as I squirted a plastic tube up, down and around the house.

The Sphero and Ollie (in the air) robotic toys from Orbotix.

THE hallway in our home turned into a makeshift drag strip as I squirted a highly mobile, smartphone-controlled, brightly lit ­plastic tube up, down and around the house.

The Ollie is the latest robot toy from Sphero, which brought a similarly themed robot ball a while back. I used the Android Ollie app (there’s an Apple app as well) on a Samsung S5 and getting control of the toy was simply a matter of holding the phone on the Ollie until they linked up via Bluetooth.

Driving the Ollie was another matter. It takes some L-plate time with the finger swipe joypad on the phone until you can drive around with confidence and the Ollie sometimes gets disoriented and requires a recalibration.

Once you get the hang of it, the little gadget is fun. It will scoot along at up to 22km/h and slew around sharply on its knobby rubber tyres and can be controlled at ranges of up to 30m.

There’s also sorts of tricks and here the multi-hue capable LED lights built-in to the middle of the thing come into their own. With the Ollie up on one track spinning like a top, it looks like a disco ball gone mad. Tricks can be activated using a separate touch pad on the app screen.

It’s quite durable too. Jumping the Ollie off a ramp at high speed on our polished wooden floors did no damage at all to the polycarbonate shell. Battery life is good, there’s about an hour’s play from a full charge via a USB cable.

That said, I’d be wary of letting very young children loose with the Ollie. The hard plastic toy hurtling along at 22km/h could hurt a toddler’s foot, let alone the family pet.

I suspect the more kinetically inclined child will get long-term joy while for others it will be a one afternoon wonder.

Price: $149.95

Rating: 7/10