Ed's Note: Please note that in light of the negativity of this review, we liaised with the PR company and they assured us that Spykee was tested before being sent to us.

When I first discovered Spykee was coming to my house I was pretty excited. Some people may call me a geek; I like to think of myself a simple fan of geeky things.
I did some research and looked Spykee up. He is a robotic toy (that sounds like a robot to me, excellent, more excitement) that has a webcam, microphone and speakers. You can control him from your computer (either in the house/room or over the internet from anywhere) and move him around, watch his webcam, take photos, make sounds and so on. He is apparently for children around 8 years old and up.

Spykee comes in a box and requires a little bit of building, this is fairly simple but not quite as easy as you might think, or as the instructions make out. Once he’s out of the box and all put together the fun really starts. Now I’m not showing off or anything but I have a computing degree, I work in computing and I’m about to become an ICT teacher, I’m not concerned about my ICT skills. Well I wasn’t, until I started to try and use Spykee.

The instructions are complicated. Each step of the instructions comes with a fairly substantial list of things that might go wrong that, even after 8 pages, I still kept thinking were part of the instructions leading to much confusion and frustration. Even when I had gone through all the instructions one at a time and set everything up, it took 5 attempts to get Spykee to do anything. When he finally did drive across my living room floor showing me the side of my sofa getting closer and closer, I was suitably excited but it was short lived. His battery doesn’t appear to last longer than a few minutes and he definitely doesn’t find his recharging box himself (as he is supposed to).

My excitement about Spykee quickly descended into disappointment. I am unsure of how he is supposed to be used, I can imagine most children finding it incredibly hard to set him up and the battery life is so poor it doesn’t seem worth it in the first place. All in all, it seems the idea of Spykee is far more fun than the reality.

Spykee has an RRP of £199.99, is available online from Amazon and at all usual retailers.

For more information see Meccano and Spykee World