Tablets get dirty. It tends to happen with objects you poke at with your fingers and drag your fingers all over a lot. Most of us solve this problem with the simple expedient of dragging a sleeve across the screen.
The Japanese, it seems, are a wee bit more fastidious.
If you’ve seen a Roomba, you’ve seen Tomy Takara’s tablet cleaning device in action. You put your tablet on a flat surface, flick it on, and it roams over your screen, scrubbing away fingerprints and other detritus. It’s got sensors to tell it when it’s about to go off the edge.
To be fair, I can see this having some use in, say, a place that fixes tablets, but this is a $17 device aimed squarely at the consumer. True, this isn’t the weirdest, fussiest gadget that’s been unleashed on the Japanese public, and will likely be headed over here at speed, for that guy you know who Windexes his monitor every day.
Hey, if it keeps your tablet clean, it’s OK, but do we really need a robot to do this?
Auto Mee S [Akihabara News]