Sphero review

The Sphero looks like a mutant hybrid of a baseball and a plastic Easter egg you hide candy inside. It’s a translucent white color, with the blue Sphero logo on it, and while it looks like you could open up its halves you’re definitely not supposed to. The only real thing separating this ball from one you might find at a toy store is the moving part inside, which looks like either a fish or a bat, depending on which Verge staffer you ask. That’s the piece that contains all the ball’s various hardware, which is constantly moving around inside the ball to keep it oriented properly. It makes Sphero feel oddly alive, as if something’s going to come bursting out of it at any moment.

All the internals parts make the 5.9-ounce ball a little heavy, and oddly fragile — you’re not supposed to drop it from more than six inches, or kick or throw the ball. I did all of those things unintentionally or otherwise, and the Sphero survived the beating just fine. You shake the ball twice to turn it on, and the LED starts to glow a bunch of different colors; it rotates through several different ones, or you can control it manually with your phone. It has thousands of possible colors, and cycles through a lot of them when you drop it into the inductive charging cradle. Basically, it’s perfect for lighting up a dark room, or you know, a rave.

Sphero

This self-titled app is basically a catch-all for using the Sphero. You can move the ball around using an on-screen joystick or using a cool drawing feature that lets you map out the ball’s entire path and then watch it follow your route. You can change the ball’s color and speed, and do a couple of wacky things like ask the ball yes-or-no questions and have it blink different colors for different answers.

This is the app you also use to connect to Sphero World, a web app that lets you track how much you play with the Sphero, how far the ball travels, and various achievements — like your best golf score. You can also join a Sphero Swarm and track your progress against other people; it’s like the most bare-bones version of Xbox Live you can think of.

You can also name your Sphero — mine came to me named "Buttercup," but you can call it whatever you want. A company rep promises that there’s a lot more to come from Sphero World to make it more of a full online platform, an idea that reminds me a bit of the Nike+ website.

SpheroCam

The Sphero ball promises plenty of YouTube-able moments with pets or small children, and the SpheroCam app overlays Sphero controls on top of a basic camera interface, so you can control the ball and and take pictures or video of it at the same time. Whatever you capture gets dropped into the Photos or Gallery app on your phone, and you can share stuff from there. Sadly, there’s no camera on the ball, which would be even better, but at least it’s a way to capture how much a colored ball can confuse your dog.

Spherodrive

This is the app for the serious Sphero owner. It gives you three different ways to control the ball — the same joystick as in the basic Sphero app, plus RC car-style up-down and left-right controls, and an accelerometer-based control. I’d say I spent 80 percent of my time using SpheroDrive since most of the fun of it is just driving it around (and occasionally terrifying my family’s pets). It takes some time to get good at maneuvering the thing, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a good time.

draw&drive

The draw-to-drive feature is impressive, though not quite useful. You can draw basic paths for the ball to follow in the regular Sphero app, but Draw&Drive brings some added control: you can make the ball go slightly left, then turn pink and go right, then go green and backward. It remembers surprisingly long and complex paths, and follows them closely, if imperfectly — if I had it go around and then come back to where it started, it always came close, but usually missed the exact mark.

Sphero golf

If you’ve got a white ball rolling around, why not make a golf game, right? Essentially the idea is that you set up your own golf course wherever you are, using cups or bowls or room corners as holes, and then use the app to try and get the ball in the hole. You can use a driver, iron or putter, and you track your score as you go. It’s an interesting idea, but the implementation falls short; you can’t really use any kind of touch, and the ball’s not quite accurate enough to make the game fun and challenging (you end up using entire walls as holes, because you can at least hit those).