Bandai, the creator of the original Tamagotchi, has announced another big move into the world of electronic animal care with Smartpet — a robot dog that uses your iPhone as a brain. Controlled via a free app, Smartpet will react to your touchscreen gestures with over 100 facial expressions, and you can make it do tricks by voice commands or movements in front of the Facetime camera.
Users can also customize their SmartPet by selecting from a choice of faces and adding accessories and thanks to that Bandai Tamagotchi heritage, look after their digital pooch by checking on its health and feeding or medicating it via the touchscreen menu. The menu also lets users access games with their SmartPet, set it to play music or interact with other SmartPets using Bluetooth.
