My wife got on of IRobot's Roomba as a gift last Christmas, and it's probably the greatest home appliance to date...even cooler than the George Foreman grill. Set the thing up, and it will vacuum your floors while you do other things. It has a various beeps and musical noises that you quickly learn to understand. If it gets caught up it cries out for help, and when it's done, it goes back to it's recharger and shuts itself down. It's the closest thing you can get to your own R2-unit...I half expect to find Kenny Baker hanging out in the thing every time I go to empty the lint trap. It simply rules. This is the first step, the robotic cleaner, that the old Looney Tunes/MGM cartoons always had, predicting the future.

Sadly, our Roomba is on the fritz. I can see the thing trying to do its job, but when we turn it on, it bangs around the room more incoherently than normal, than it just spins in circles until it blows a gasket and disappointedly fizzles out and stops. Feeling sorry for the little guy quickly fades to anger. Now, not only do I have to vacuum the floors myself, I have to move R2-Roomba out of the way to do it. No wonder people hate droids in SW. If they do their jobs, well, they're supposed to...if they don't, it messes up everything else. To top it off, there's no local jawas that know how to replace any of the parts...no wookies around with a blowtorch and duct tape to fix it....and it's already on the verge of being outdated with the upcoming release of Scooba, who washes the floors. *shakes fist at technology*

In the end, it's all well and good I suppose, but what I really need is a droid that understands the color separation languages of laundry machines.