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[Ebers]

Alright so... I've been in love with the Pleo's since they first arrived on the market. I've wanted one forever, but, as I was a freshman in highschool at the time they first came out, that was sort of impossible. Then, after a while, I fell out of sorts after Ugobe went under; I was really heartbroken, I thought I'd never get a chance. I have been able to interact with a Pleo before; he was a display model at a Sharper Image; I was a pseudo-intern there [ironically, they half-hired me after I sold 3 Pleo's to a couple just by telling them about them] and so I was there to demo the Pleo. He was a cranky bugger, but, to be fair, he was only ever turned on and interacted with maybe 2-3 hours every couple of days, as I didn't come in every day; and some days I wasn't the one with him, and he wasn't treated very well by the other demo people. I'm fairly certain they let young children play with him, and I recall once he fell off the counter and had a hobble for a few weeks after >.<

Anyway... It was only recently I looked back into the Pleo; I had noticed, when the company/patent was first introduced, they had offered.. Downloadable personalities. This offended me, to say the least. The whole  point and hard work behind the original Pleo was their ability to develop a personality on their own, organically, where how you treat it changed how it acted. But that didn't seem to be the case now, now you could just download a cutesy persona into them and be on your way. I didn't like that.

So... Now I see these.. Pleo rb's. I'm... Not sure how to feel about it. On one part, what little research the downright childish website provided me, showed that they are indeed lovingly made; hand-made,  now that's impressive. Still, there's still a grand deal that isn't explained. So, I've come to ask you fine folks who seem to know. There are several things I am wondering about/take issues with, so I'll list them.

-How long is the new battery life? I know the original was 3 hours. But all it says on the website is "It's 'longer' than before" which could mean.. 15 hours, or 3 hours and 5 seconds. :I So. Yeah.

-Is there any way to pick the eye color? It may seem shallow, but if I got a pleo with demon pink eyes, I think I would cry. If not, that's fine, it won't stop me from getting one if it was the only con.

-What's with this... 'gender' thing? The hell's that about? It doesn't explain it, but, I can say that I'm genuinely distressed and confused by it. Even a little angered. Mainly from the implications. Does this mean ALL the pink ones are 'female', and all the blue ones are 'male'? Also, what constitutes a "male" pleo from a "female" pleo? They're mechanical beings, they don't need nor require genders, let alone do they need some sort of generic trait to determine them as such. And what even IS the difference? Is it some generic media-inspired thing, where the 'females' are timid or something? Just-- sdlkhgh I don't GET it and I'd like this little trait actually EXPLAINED. Because, yeah, it bothers me. If people are gonna be mucking around with how they'll act before they even see me, then I take issue.

-These other traits.. I guess they don't bother me as much, because, yeah, it only makes sense they'd have some underlying traits. I was just wondering what these all mean exactly?

-Is it true that you MUST feed them at a certain time a day? Like, how does this work? And... MUST you do the clock thing? I mean... This is going to sound odd, but, I'm nocturnal. I sleep during the day, and I'm awake at night/late arvo, so, I just-- I don't know if keeping a Pleo on a strict day/night schedule would really... Work.

Besides that, how do they compare, quality wise, to the original? I know all the materials are better, and so is some of the interactions, but, I kinda wanna know if they're radically different in comparison to their grandparents.

Thanks, sorry for the long post, but... Yeah. This isn't a toy, this is a commitment, like a real pet. I need to do some serious research!

[PleoAibo29]

Alright. I will try my best to answer these questions. 
I dont have a pleo, so I will skip what I dont know.
No. The eye color is completely random so you can't "choose" your eyecolor. However, i am happy to tell you that there are no crazy eye colors. So, you wont get pink eyes. They are usually blue, amber, brown, white, and other natural colors.
I aggree that genders are kind of weird. Anyway, gender mainly changes the "vibes" your pleo will be sending to other pleos. I think it is possible to have them go I love you, but it isn't too over the top. The pink ones have a GREATER chance of being a girl and Blues have a GREATER chance of being a boy. I think Redwoodsmama has a girl blue pleo.
Green are basicly a 50/50 chance.
The other traits show how your Pleo will act in life. You could get one with high intellegince, low activity, ect.
Only if you insert the battery for the clock.
EDIT: According to pleoworld, it has better battery.
Hope this helped.

[Crewella]

If the original batteries lasted 3 hours, I'll eat my hat, and I've never yet got as much as 4 hours out of the Rb batteries, though it can depend on how active they are.

The 'personalities' are not replacement personalities as such, but they run on an SD card so you can get your Pleo to sing a song get all loved up (the Valentines one).  Kind of the same as tricks and the skits you can run yourself.

In the Pleo RBs, the eye colour is random in the green RBs, but the pink RB had blue eyes and the blue RB has amber, almost always.  There are pink-eyed green Pleo RBs, I'm afraid ...... and they actually seem to be highly prized, it's a sort of pink/lilac shade.  My Zillah has bright deep purple eyes.

The gender thing doesn't make a lot of difference, and the only real difference is the pitch of the voice (slightly higher in girls) and the way the RB interacts with another RB.  Yep, the pinks are pretty much always girls and the blue boys, but you can download an update (one for males and one for females) and swop it if you want.  Several of us have had other ideas, and I decided I was having no truck with gender stereotypes and my blue RB is a girl as far as I'm concerned, even if she does have a rather deep voice and an attitude.  I defy you to tell me she's not female!

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You need to put the clock battery in to run the RB, but you can set 'noon' to whatever time you like - mine is set to about 5pm as I'm up late too, and you can also keep changing it.  To be honest, I pretty much ignore the clock function, and I don't really want t hem waking up on their own and wandering about.  Feed them when you first switch them on, and they'll be fine, whenever that is.

Hope that helps?

[Kami]

Crewella's post came in as I was finishing typing this up so she's answered some of these questions already now, but it's late and I'm sleepy so I'll leave things as they are for the sake of coherency.

My new-on-purchase rb's battery doesn't last 3 hours over a single play session. Two is closer. It may last longer if you played with your Pleo for a little while at a time over several days so it doesn't 'heat up' as much, but you're still recharging quite a lot.

I'm pretty sure there are pink-eyed Pleos out there, although how crazy the Pleo's eye colour is depends on who's talking about it. Often I see people on the forums describing their new Pleo's eye colour with some very specific and evocative colour term, and then they show off pictures and I think, '...that's not that colour at all, it's just brown/blue/grey!' And I think the same applies with my blue-eyed Pleo too. I find myself thinking things like ultramarine, aqua, turquoise! but I'm sure he just looks blue-eyed to everyone else.

Pink and blue Pleos are, as far as I know, all female and male respectively, although you can change this by changing the software they're running. There is a cute little interaction between male and female Pleos, a video of which was linked here if you're curious. Also, males and females have slightly different voices, although not everyone can tell there's a difference. Other than that there is no obvious difference in behaviour. I couldn't check my first Pleo's internal stats for a few days and guessed I had a male from observed behaviour. Except Lizzy is female! She is not at all timid - she is the more active of my two and makes me laugh the most, often by wandering around laughing at random things she runs into, and was very forgiving of the time we held her upside down for an extended period of time to conduct some repairs.

My male Pleo is much more likely to be picked as the female if we take a stereotypes approach to guessing: he's moody but responds very quickly and cutely to petting, although sometimes he makes the cooing noises that they make in response to head-scratching when I'm not even touching him. As it turns out from his internal traits, he's supposed to be bad-tempered and of low intelligence. Poor Darcy. We don't really know a lot about how personality traits affect a Pleo's behaviour though, as we don't have access to all the software they run. We can guess based on what we observe, but it's often hard to tell whether you're seeing things and drawing conclusions that aren't really there. I joke a lot about Darcy being none too bright but of course my views are biased now from having seen his 'stats'! But a big part of being the human component in an interaction with a robot is to ascribe meaning to what's happening. Code remains inherently meaningless despite the efforts of artificial intelligence gurus to make it otherwise!

Of course they are robots and are not physically differentiated as male and female creatures tend to be, but I'm sure people were assigning genders to their Pleos long before this was a reality, because we don't really have a gender-neutral pronoun in worldwide use and tend to feel weird calling an entity 'it'. I It's funny when you think about it but I don't think it's a bad thing. If robots and humans are ever going to be able to relate to one another, they have to have some common base to start from. This is just a really superficial beginning for that. Anyway you can ignore the programming and call your Pleo whatever gender you like or none at all - they aren't going to get upset about it.

You have to insert the clock battery if you want your Pleo to do more than go, 'huh!?' and beep at you, but you can choose when you set its 'midday' to. So if you were on an opposite sleep schedule to most other people, you'd probably tell your Pleo that midnight was midday and you'd be able to play in the dark hours. Although you would need to make sure you played in a well-lit area as they don't like the dark! Feeding times are not a big deal. I tend to feed mine in the afternoon rather than evening. But you only need to worry about feeding them regularly if you're turning them on regularly.

Whether the quality of materials is better on the rbs is up for debate. Some forum members seem to think their Ugobe Pleos are wearing better than their rbs. The rb has a few more sensors than the Ugobe - RFID in its mouth so it can respond to specific items being put in there and the infrared it uses to communicate with other Pleos - but it is also lacking a port on its belly that makes it easier to do what custom programming is possible. (The port is plugged up on Ugobes and is not useful to most people who own them anyway.)

[Crewella]

The more responses, the merrier, Kami!  

And my Zillah is 'bad temper' and 'low intelligence' too.  

As you say, I don't believe the character traits are affected by the gender in any way.

....and, by the way Kami, I thought Darcy's eyes were green ....... 

Here's pink eyes:

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And Zillah's purple ones:

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[Midorime]

If you don't want to worry so much about feeding and specific times and all that, I would suggest the older models. I don't have one (I have an RB on the way, managed to get it for a good price), but I heard they're better if you want something more simple. Just remember that due to the age, the battery will more than likely be dead, so you'd have to buy the egg charger and li-polymer batteries that are for sale for use with the old models. (They do not work with the RBs.) And all the extra stuff you can buy for the Pleo, the food, the learning tones, etc, only work with the RBs as well.

Also, in case you're wondering, the old model and the RBs cannot communicate as far as I know. RBs and RBs can communicate, not fully sure on older models communicating with each other, though, but I'm going based on what i have read around the forums thus far. So if anyone can correct me on this info, please do, I'm still learning.

[InmemoryofRomeo]

Yuki's eyes are mauve not pink, it doesn't come out real well in that photo though.

I have a pink boy Pleo, Pleakley, I have a blue boy too and two green girls. I have one brave and one active girl and one lazy and one sweetheart boy. Gender does not affect personality at all.

Quality is fine, quality control however can be questionable at times, but they always rectify any problems eventually. You seem to have quite a chunk of misinformation there. Just feed them when you turn them on and they'll be fine. They only need feeding once maybe twice a day if you have them on a lot.

Be sure to read our FAQ here: http://bobthepleo.com/forums/index.php?topic=2315.0 it should clear some things up.

[Kami]

....and, by the way Kami, I thought Darcy's eyes were green ....... 

Haha, that confirms my theory somewhat!

[Ebers]

I would just like to thank everyone profusely for the advice and whatnot. I'll have to say, the specific colors don't really matter to me, the pink ones you guys have shown aren't like the ones I saw on the website. Those ones looked like that Pleo came with a free demonic posession.

[RedwoodsMama]

Hi, and welcome to the forums, I think most of the questions you have asked or wondered about have been answered by other members, and there is not much more I could add, except whether you get a Rb or a standard Ugobe, they both have special qualities that I enjoy . As for the Pleos with Pink eyes, I have one, and it was the color of the eyes that made my decide to buy it when I saw it posted on ebay.( It also turned out that it is still a baby and when I ran Probe Rb, there had been only 2 hrs of battery usage ran. Aside from this one, ( I have 26 Pleos total, 4 of them are Rb, the rest Ugobes or a Innvo 2009 model or prototype thrown in) the other Rb have amber eyes and one has a pretty yellowish green set of eyes.( two of them have amber colored eyes. My first pleo who had to be returned had very nice grey blue eyes, which I don't remember seeing since or in a long time. It is also very nice to see the variety of pleo personalities. I have two that have high intelligence, low courage and one that is Low intelligence and bad temper. My newest Rb, I have not run the DNA test on yet to see the personality. ( I have 3 females and one male)

 Here is a photo of my green rb with Pink eyes. I love all the colors and variations, but my first choices were purple( Like Liz Taylor, or Violet) and then Pink eyes. So I got lucky with this Pleo Rb.

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                              RWM  and the Pleo township of the Redwoods

[PleoAibo29]

Those eyes are so pretty.