There are further additions if you don’t care to program your pooch. You can “potty train” your Aibo using a mapping feature, teach it to be quiet and carry it in an upright position. You can also feed the bot by using virtual coins to buy “aibocrisps,” but you’ll want to be cautious. While you’ll earn coins for free by signing into the My Aibo app, Sony also offers coins for purchase with real-world money. Yes, your robot dog now has microtransactions.

Aibo is still far from a trivial purchase at $2,900. However, the developer tools make it easier to justify if you’re the tinkering sort. You can treat it more as a project than a novelty with a fixed set of features.

There’s clearly a publicity element to the rapid turnaround for the fix. It both softens the blow of the initial flaw and makes Tesla look that much better by delivering a solution so quickly. At the same time, this does make a case for over-the-air car updates. In conventional cars, you might have to wait ages for a fix or visit a dealership — now, quicker patches like these can deploy within hours.

The pup was reportedly cloned by plucking somatic cells (used relatively often in cloning) from the skin of the adult dog, creating a cloned embryo and implanting that into a beagle for birth.

Researcher Wan Jiusheng said that Kunxun was promising — there’s “good aptitude” for sniffing and other skills needed in a police dog. He might enter service as soon as 10 months after training. This is an experiment for now, Wan added, but the ultimate plan is to “mass produce” cloned police dogs sometime within the next 10 years. There would even be a cell bank to help quickly breed a collection of dogs.

The move could raise further ethical questions about cloning animals, including issues specific to police forces. Not everyone is likely to relish the thought of a unit full of virtually identical dogs, and there are associated risks. If there are any genetic weaknesses, a large portion of the force could be vulnerable to diseases or other hard-to-predict issues. As it stands, you’re unlikely to see other police forces (at least, outside of China) rush to embrace this concept even if it works as hoped.

A long battery life is a boon for any product, obviously, but for a device like this it’s extremely helpful. No-one wants to be messing around with Fido’s collar every few days, and sheer bad luck dictates they’ll manage to escape when it’s on charge. Fi’s collar uses AT&T’s LTE-M low power network to keep going as long as it does. It’s also got a useful lost dog mode, which tells owners and dog walkers straight away if the dog busts out of its permitted area. This comes with a remotely-activated collar light, too, so the dog will be easier to spot at night.

Like Whistle, Fi’s collar requires a subscription to access all of its features, although it’s a bit cheaper than its main competitor: between $1.59 and $1.89 per week, compared to Whistle’s starting price of $6.95 per month. (The device itself, however, is a little pricier — $149 compared to Whistle’s $100). Plus, it looks good. Unlike some other pet tracking devices on the market, Fi’s is sleeker and less obtrusive, so your dog will be as happy wearing it as you are knowing they’re in safe hands. It’s available now at tryfi.com.