LEGO Mindstorms Will Survive

thufir writes "LEGO has released a press release, where they dismiss the rumour that MINDSTORMS is being taken out of production. For some reason the changes in product policy lead to the misunderstanding that they would totally drop the product. 'Hearsay has it that a product range like LEGO MINDSTORMS is no longer in focus. This is not true. On the contrary, MINDSTORMS, CLIKITS and BIONICLE are all good examples of products the company wants to stake on.'" See our previous stories, Lego to Stop Producing Mindstorms and Lego Goes Back to the Basics.

Comments

Re:News for nerds, indeed

[Rallion]

True that.

Girl I'm with now decided she wanted to be with me after she saw my collection of sci-fi books. Turns out it shared a good number of titles with her own. It's nice, we share interests.

Now that I think about it, that's because years before I met her I had suggested them to a friend, who suggested them to a friend, who suggested them to her. But that's very much beside the point.

Re:Lego

[corebreech]

It is extremely cool. I got my niece and nephew one for Christmas, and had the totally righteous pleasure of helping them build a robot and watching them program it (well, watching my 10-year-old niece program it, my much younger nephew had ideas of his own as to the proper use of the technology.)

This is great news from Lego. *This* should be their future. There are so many different directions they can go with this the mind staggers at the possibilities.

What I want to see are smart bricks, i.e., bricks that are able to communicate with one another in some limited fashion. They've already got the ability to send power through the little Lego connector dealies, why not data? This would allow an assembled robot to communicate its design to the computer; it would also allow a program to discover whether the robot has been damaged.

And how about RFID tags for these bricks? The most fabulously awesome robot would be one that goes around the house looking for lost Lego pieces.

It needs to be cheaper too. By cutting the cost in half they'll end up selling way more than double the units. The way it's priced now, your average mom and dad are going to choose something like the XBox instead... they're not going to understand the tremendous potential these toys can unlock in a young mind.