Sphero Star Wars BB-8 Droid

As a kid who grew up with the original Star Wars toys of the 70's and 80's, I really wanted to like this BB-8. Unfortunately, due to it's lack of usable features and an app that hands ultimate control of YOUR droid over to an incompetent bunch of hacks, mine is going back. When my BB-8 arrived at my door, I was excited. I had watched all of the videos online, and I was really expecting to enjoy having my very own BB-8, made by the same company that built the unit used in the movie. The packaging was top notch, and opening the box felt like I was about to see something well worth the $150 price tag. The unit itself is well made, with a very sturdy and sound fit and finish. The materials are obviously high end, and no one is going to confuse this as a child's toy. This is a quality replica, and the design is absolutely collector grade. Sadly, the function doesn't live up the look and feel. After downloading the app and synching up with the droid, you quickly realize that there are only about 10 or so things that you can actually do with the droid, and that makes for about 15-30 minutes of play time before it's just plain boring. I guess if I had a pet to chase around the house with it, it may have gotten a little more mileage...but honestly, how long can rolling a ball around the floor really hold your attention? There are cool internal lights, but no way to activate them on command. There are eight pre-programmed actions, but you can only see four of them at a time. And even after you start to get the hang of switching back and forth between the pre-programmed action menus, you have to back out to the direction menu to re-orient the directional controls every five minutes when the droid's sense of true north gets out of whack. It's really just far more fun to look at than it is to actually play with, and that's just disappointing. Even with all of the functional shortcomings, I was still planning to keep the droid as the ultimate desktop conversation piece...until today. Today the Sphero folks made it very clear that this toy is not ready for prime time when they sent out two "transmissions" from C-3PO and R2-D2 to highlight the "messaging" feature of the BB-8. You would think that would add interesting and fun content to the BB-8 "Star Wars" experience, but instead they just spammed my app with two upside down thumbnails that make it look about as professional and believable as Jar Jar Binks. Not only did they ruin the appearance of my messaging menu, they sent an additional software/firmware update along with the message that doubled the initialization time of the app. So now it's slower and lamer, with absolutely no added benefit. Obviously concerned, I wrote the company and asked what could be done to correct these issues. Their response was that there is nothing that could be done to correct the orientation of the images, and that there was no way to undo any update that had been pushed through. Further, there was no way to disable automatic updates, no way to opt out of these second rate spam messages, and basically no way to take control of the device that I had paid for. They would maintain control in perpetuity, whether I wanted them to or not. That means they can strip the app of any function that I may enjoy, force changes to the interface whenever they're feeling "creative", and basically alter MY droid at will in any way they see fit until it dies. Now I could understand if this were some sort of networked unit that needed to stay current to interact with all of the other devices on the network, but this is a stand alone toy. There is absolutely no reason a person shouldn't be allowed to purchase this droid and keep it in its original out-of-the-box configuration, if they so desire. In fact that's kind of a big deal to Star Wars collectors. But they couldn't care less. After all, they already got your money. I guess Steve Jobs would be proud of Sphero's ability to sell a toy and maintain complete control over it forever, but any free thinking individual who grew up on Star Wars toys of the past should be appalled. I for one will never pay $150+ for a toy that can only be played with at the pleasure of the manufacturer, so I'll be taking my control(and money) back.