We saw Fujitsu’s “service robot” ENON back in October 2008 during the CEATEC exhibition in Chiba/Japan (see video below), and it seems the friendly guy has been selling well in the meantime. The robot can be used as an information terminal, for entertainment purposes, patrolling, assistance etc. And last weekend, ENON could be seen in the wild, namely in a shopping mall in Osaka.

That specific ENON spent the entire Saturday interacting with customers. Equipped with a camera and face recognition software, the robot is capable of detecting a human’s gender and age. Combine this with ENON’s ability to “speak” and move around, and you get a store clerk of a very different kind.

During the test in Osaka, ENON was able to sweet-talk different customers into going to different stores, depending on the age and gender of the people he interacted with. Reportedly, the robot recommended a bar to a woman in her 30s by telling her the style of the bar would fit her beauty. ENON can switch between a female and a male voice, too.

Here’s the robot recommending a seafood restaurant:

Here’s ENON trying to talk people into going to a bar:

And finally, here’s the ENON video I made over one year ago at the CEATEC show:

Via Plastic Pals via Sankei News [JP] via Robonable [JP]

There is a fairly standard montage in the canon of bad 80s movies. It involves the protagonist(s) working hard to build/do/invent something to beat the stuck up and dismissive antagonists. See, for example, Summer Rental, a John Candy vehicle in which Candy and crew convert a seafood restaurant that was originally a boat back into a boat in order to win a big, rich boat race against snobs. I don’t quite recall why they needed to win the race, but that’s immaterial. In the end [SPOILER ALERT] they thumb their noses, triumphantly, at the crews of the other, more richly appointed boat. It’s the tale of the underdog – an important tale to be told in that dark decade – and it is applicable here.

This brings us to the HTC Hero, HTC’s first Android phone using their new Sense UI.

In one sense the Hero is “just another Android phone”; in another sense, it’s an entirely new direction for HTC and the platform.

The Hero is a great phone. It is on par – and ultimately better – than the Palm Pre and, some would say, the iPhone on many points. It also turns those lumbering Windows Mobile and Symbian into something that you will fondly remember from your youth, a set of dinosaur technologies now extinct.

Furthermore, we can easily extend the metaphor above to say that the Hero is John Candy lacquering the deck while Apple and Palm are the rich, stuck-up yacht club members laughing at the upstart. I’m here to tell you that these yacht club members should ignore this upstart at their peril.