I've been dodging writing about all of the crazy new toys that've been announced lately. I'm sick of spending words pontificating on things that might never come out. I've seen too many toys get lots of attention and never ship, and I don't feel like joining the media circus that is the current "LOOK, TECHNOLOGY YOU CAN STICK IN/STICK IT IN" press release copypastafest. I figure I'll wait for things to either be released or be interesting, and join in that fanfare.

Lovepalz now apparently fulfills the released part. I have yet to hear of anyone actually getting their hands on one. There's been no pictures posted of the finished product. No word of the software that'll be used to run it. But according to a text only post their website, your Zeus or Hera will now be on its way to you as soon as you confirm your shipping info. They didn't even update their Facebook page. Huh.

Anyways, I can technically post about them now without breaking my own rules. Though it's pretty much a complete guess as to what's going on.

WINZZ, the company behind the Lovepalz, does not fill me with hope. They started with a media campaign about being kicked off Kickstarter. That's fine, it's how the PR game is played, even though we can't confirm whether kickstarter actually did that. However, they used that to harvest information versus actually trying their own crowdfunding (not that crowdfunding sex projects is easy), not actually taking orders for the product until months later, and then not actually shipping the product until April 20. This seems kinda sketchy to me.

I know pretty much fuck all about this thing. I can tell you the chips in it (because they posted them), the dimensions of the hardware (because they posted them), some of the basic usage principles (From watching the videos they posted)... But I have no idea if it works as sex hardware, or how interaction will work, or pretty much anything that would make me throw $189 plus $30 shipping at it. I've never really seen anyone ride on their PR alone in sex hardware like this. Usually some sex blogger gets one and does the talking for them.

Weird part that keeps me thinking at the moment? It's wifi. I think it's actually the first self-connecting toy. Everything else has been either wired, bluetooth, or radio. I mean, wifi is great. It's wireless, you don't have to worry about bluetooth stacks or dongles, even if configuration can suck sometimes. The paranoid side of my brain thinks that also means that they could easily tie it to their own service, effectively pulling what RealTouch did before they went open source, only allowing the device to work via some sort of permissions process. The screens in the image above are apparently from LovePalz website, which means all device configuration and interaction either takes place on a locally running webserver (in which case they haven't solved platform agnosticism via browser as interface?) or on their site (which means flash or else they are bleeding some motherfucking edge on the HTML5 'cause WebRTC has landed mainline anywhere yet? Ok sorry I'll stop web nerding)? The configuration process is unknown, and there are no screens on the device itself. So you somehow have to at least set it up on your wifi, but how? I realize these are things that no one worries about because you're supposed to fuck it, but, well, if I didn't worry about these things, there wouldn't be a slashdong.

It's not that I don't think sex toy manufacturers can't make a good product. I just don't trust them to, especially not an unproven company's first product.

Maybe they'll prove me wrong. That would be awesome.