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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

You should not be surprised. If you look at most of the jobs in the careers page for example [0], they mention the need for "Experience with framework-level customization of AOSP" and that the app is in "Flutter".

So this was immediately obvious that it was running Android. It is just that this was a nice and perfectly packaged scam, but not as expensive scam like the Humane AI Pin.

and yes. Humane is also using Android for their AI Pin devices. Unsurprisingly. [1]

[0] https://boards.greenhouse.io/rabbit/jobs/4229430007

[1] https://humane.com/jobs/5045093004

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The kind of SoC that you would put into something like this often only has official support for Android, too. If you're making any kind of mobile thing then Android is almost certainly the path of least resistance nowadays.

The Playstation Portal is another good example, it's a single-purpose device just for streaming games from a PS5 but it runs full blown Android, locked down so you can't use it for anything else.

The AI Pin is at least a wearable that puts a camera and a projector on your chest. That's not much, but it's something vaguely novel.

The Rabbit thing is literally just a terrible phone.

Absolutely nothing wrong with using Android as a base for this.

Using Android doesn't make it a scam.

The scam is they are selling it as anything other than "phone with fewer features"

Are Android tablets a scam too?

No, because the title is honest. An Android tablet means exactly that. An "AI Assistant" does not. That implies it's something much more than it is.

Why is it not an ai assistant?

This reviewer seems to think it wasn't all that "assistanty"

https://youtu.be/ddTV12hErTc?si=WGJLu6TwzYVgQ5wE

So? A scam is a scheme to profit by using dishonesty. Making something poorly, or cheaply, or not to anyone's liking has absolutely no bearing whatsoever as to whether something is a scam.

Things can be (and many things are) gimmicky, early development, cheaply made, or made to someone else's preferences in a completely honest way. This is that.

That’s not a scam, either. They’re not being dishonest about what the hardware really is. They’re probably at least being unrealistically optimistic about the future software, though.

Yes they are. It's not an AI assistant. It's a smartphone with fewer features and slightly different form factor.

This review was interesting:

https://youtu.be/ddTV12hErTc?si=-SZ1xUpj5-KE7xWD

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