Although I tried, having a WowWee Mr. Personality wasn’t meant to be.
I bought one from Amazon and was thrilled when it arrived. But the thrill wore off quickly. I was able to bring up its menu and put in my personal information, customizing the ownership aspects of the robot. That’s about as far as I got. Mr. Personality refused to respond to commands from the remote control. I changed its batteries, reset it, tried holding the remote with the other hand and even considered finding and killing a sheep to sacrifice to the robot gods. But nothing would get the 2 foot tall robot to respond properly.
I returned it to Amazon and was thrilled that they overnighted a replacement to me. Again I began to sing along with B.B King’s The Thrill is Gone. This robot did exactly the same thing the previous one did. Back it went to Amazon and I sat waiting for the third Mr. Personality. I hoped, as the expression goes, that the third time would be the charm.
Much to my surprise and frustration, Amazon refused to replace it. They wrote me saying this
Hello, I'm sorry to hear the replacement WowWee Mr. Personality had the same problem as your first order. This usually doesn't happen. Since it's likely another replacement would arrive defective, I won't trouble you with another order. Please return the item for a full refund. We'll pay for the return shipping costs.
Well, that annoyed me. I figure it’s the customers right to decide whether they want a refund or replacement. So I wrote them back explaining exactly that. Their reply was
Hello from Amazon.com. Thanks for bringing this problem to our attention. We'll investigate further and make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else. In the meantime, the item may temporarily be unavailable to purchase from Amazon.com, though it may be available from other marketplace sellers on the Amazon.com website.
So the following day I go to Amazon and lo and behold, Mr. Personality is not only still there, he’s on sale for $20 less than I paid for him!
What this means to me is Amazon thinks that I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to press buttons on a remote control, so they don’t wish to waste any more time and effort on replacements.
For reasons I won’t bore you with I spent in the neighborhood of $9,000 with Amazon during the last 14 months. So I figure they’ve decided that they have taken enough of my money. So out of kindness to them, I figure I won’t give them any more of it.
Anyway, this concludes my review of Mr. Personality and my interest in owning one.
It’s too bad. Actually, WowWee had a great idea with Mr. Personality. The idea was that its owner could download and install other personalities for the robot from a pool they would supply. But they changed their minds and failed to produce any other than the original default personality.
Owners’s to the rescue! On the RoboCommunity website I discovered that one enterprising soul had created an editor that allowed other owners to make a copy of the original personality and then edit the copy into an all new personality of their own creation! As I was waiting for the first Mr. P to arrive from Amazon, I went out and collected up all of the software I would need to be able to make personalities for myself. I got software to create vector images, and software to convert those images to the .rle image type files used by the robot. I picked up a copy of the nifty editor, and went downloading different sound files with voice and music. I created a full development environment for the Mr. Personality. This only added fuel to the fire of my frustration at Amazon’s pronouncements. It, and the whole experience is why I’ve decided to become finicky about patronizing the online giant. They won’t miss me, their attitude makes it clear.
I even have a new source for books and other files to use with my Amazon Kindle, and I can purchase them online or from the Kindle itself using the built in web browser. Not only that, their selection includes all of the Amazon content I have interest in, plus a lot more besides. This should be a lesson in marketing for all; we customers are difficult to come by and losing our trust by treating us badly is the wrong way to do business. That’s especially true in this low economic times –which were created by other large companies who chose to make decisions for us. Now offshore companies own the majority of America’s dollars as well as the engines for earning those dollars.
Basically, I guess I don’t like Amazon’s new personality.