According to Wikipedia, Nabaztag is Armenian for “rabbit”. It is also the name for a whimsical Wi-Fi enabled toy rabbit that can interact with you through colored lights, speech, and ear movements.

I received my little bunny as a Christmas present this year and I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. Prior to receiving it, I had never heard of it before.

The little bunny came in a colorful box and inside were the following items:

1. Nabaztag Rabbit
2. Universal AC Power Adapter
3. Instruction pamphlet

The instruction pamphlet was very brief – only telling you to plug the rabbit into a power outlet and go to www.nabaztag.com/start.

Once there, I discovered you need to have a Wi-Fi enabled computer to set things up. The first thing you do is to power up the rabbit while holding down a button on top of its head. This causes the rabbit to enter into setup mode. The rabbit will display 4 blue-colored lights (three across its tummy and one on its nose).

Then you use your computer to connect wirelessly to the rabbit in Ad Hoc mode. You do this by going to My Network Places on your computer and viewing the available nearby wireless networks. The rabbit will show up as nabaztagXX where XX is the last 2 digits of the rabbit's MAC address. I had trouble connecting from my Vista system and had to switch to my XP system before I could connect to the rabbit.

Once you have a computer connected wirelessly to the rabbit, you open up your browser and enter the address http://192.168.0.1 and this will take you to the rabbit's setup page. From there you can enter the following information to get the rabbit to talk to your wireless router:

SSID : Network Name for your router
Encryption Mode: WEP/WPA
Key: Either WEP Hex Key or WPA pass phrase
Authentication : Shared or Open

Once you enter the information above, you hit submit and the rabbit reboots and tries to connect to your router in Infrastructure Mode. The 4 lights then become orange.

It took forever for me to set things up so the rabbit could communicate with my router. If everything goes correctly, the 4 orange lights are supposed to turn from orange to green. In my case, I managed to get the 3 tummy lights to turn green but the nose would start blinking orange and never turn green and then the cycle starts over again.

You get the feeling that the rabbit was trying to connect to the router but something goes wrong and it starts over again. It was very difficult to determine what was wrong since there was no documentation on what the lights mean and I was left trying out every combination of WPA settings (WPA1, WPA2, TKIP, AES etc.) on my router in order to try to get it to connect.

Some forum posts suggested it was a bug in the rabbit's firmware which resulted it it not being able to handle a long WPA pass phrase (or a pass phrase with non-alphanumeric characters). In my case, I had a long pass phrase so I tried to use a shorter 10-character phrase but nothing would work. I tried upgrading the firmware of the rabbit but that didn't work either.

In the end, it turned out to be an advanced setting of the rabbit's setup page. There is a field called “platform” near the bottom of the setup page. My rabbit's setup page had a bunch of junk characters in this field. I found a post on the forum where someone says the field should contain the following: "r.nabaztag.com/vl".

Once I entered that value, my rabbit was finally able to connect to my router and the Internet. The lights all became green and faded away and was replaced by a pulsating purple light on its bottom (this is supposed to indicate that it has connected to the Internet).

Now that my rabbit is finally able to connect to the Internet, the next step was to go to the Nabaztag website and register the rabbit. This is where you give your rabbit a name and select which services you want to subscribe to. Some of the available services are:

1. Talking Clock. Your rabbit will announce the time every hour.
2. Reading aloud RSS feeds from CNN News, New York Times, MSN, EPSN, CNET, TechCrunch, People, MTV News, Wired News, Bloomberg etc.
3. Listening to podcasts from NPR, BusinessWeek, Twit etc.
4. Listening to streaming Internet Radio from Radio Disney, KEXP, Sky FM etc.

Your rabbit can receive email notifications from services such as gmail so you know when you receive new email whenever you're away from your computer. And people can send messages (email, SMS, MP3's) to your rabbit and it will read or play them aloud to you.

When I registered my rabbit, I noticed that it was already set up for the following services:

1. Talking Clock.
2. Nabazmoods. This is where the rabbit will say random things to you. For example, my rabbit once said to me, “Supposedly, I have brothers and sisters all over the place -- but where are they?”
3. Tai Chi. This is where the rabbit will move his/her ears around and blink his/lights in a relaxing manner. I haven't seen my rabbit do this yet.

Another neat thing is that Nabaztag has speech recognition built-in. When you want to speak to your rabbit, you just press the button on top of his head and keep it depressed. The rabbit will then beep and his nose will turn red to indicate he is listening. You can then say a keyword such as “weather” and release the button. Soon after, he will respond with the service you requested.

It can also detect RFID tags but this feature isn't supported yet. Supposedly, in the future, you can wave objects in front of your bunny and have it respond to the objects (if the objects contain embedded RFID tags).

Finally, there is a programming API available (with bindings to languages such as Java) so developers can program Nabaztag to do all sort of neat things. I think someone has developed some Vista Widgets that interact with the bunny. This is something that I would like to explore in the future.

I'm still learning and getting to know what this little bunny can do but so far it's been fun playing around with it.