Samsung’s Ballie robot? 🤖🟡

Discover the status of Samsung’s Ballie robot. From its CES 2020 debut to its AI projector features, we explore why this spherical home droid is still missing.

Another CES is nearly upon us 🎪, signaling the annual arrival of new gadgets from industry titans 🏢 and obscure startups alike 🚀. It is an open secret of the trade show that many showcased technologies never actually make it to market 🛒, though that usually applies to smaller players rather than heavyweights like Samsung 🏋️‍♂️. Yet, nearly six years since the company first introduced its personal robot, Ballie, the device remains nowhere to be found 🔍.

#Samsung’s Ballie robot

For the uninitiated, Ballie is a charming, spherical robot ⚪ designed to patrol your home 🏠 and project visuals onto the floor and walls—essentially a mobile virtual assistant 🗣️📽️. Samsung first unveiled this diminutive droid at CES 2020, though at the time, it was clearly more of a prototype than a consumer product 🛠️. Following the global pandemic 😷, the world largely forgot about quirky ball-shaped robots. However, Samsung staged a triumphant return at CES 2024 🌟, revealing a larger, refined Ballie and explicitly stating it would go on sale that year 🛍️.

That launch never materialized 💨. Instead, Ballie returned to the CES conversation a year later with a shifted timeline ⏳. Samsung promised a 2025 release 📅, reinforcing this commitment in an April press release that targeted a summer launch for Korea 🇰🇷 and the US 🇺🇸. As far as I can tell, that was the last official update 📢.

With CES looming once again 🎡, I suspect Samsung will roll Ballie out for another lap, attempting to resell the dream of an intuitive robotic companion 🤖. Having observed Ballie’s strictly choreographed demo at CES 2024, I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by its practical utility 🧐, nor was I convinced a viable market exists for it 📉. I have to wonder if Samsung’s internal data validates my skepticism 🤨; if this device were truly poised to be a blockbuster 🎬, it likely wouldn’t be stuck in such a protracted, public gestation period 🤰.

The situation evokes memories of one of Samsung’s notable missteps: the Galaxy Home smart speaker 🔊. Announced at a time when Apple 🍎 and Google 🔍 were aggressively challenging Sonos and Amazon 📦, the device aimed to move Bixby from your phone to a permanent spot in your living room 🛋️.

Rumors of the Galaxy Home began as far back as 2017 🕰️, leading to an official reveal in August 2018. My immediate reaction was that the product made little sense for either Samsung or potential customers—Bixby was lackluster 👎, and the market was already saturated with superior voice assistants 🌊. Apparently, Samsung agreed. After years of vague commitments, the company simply stopped talking about it 🤫. Curiously, a Galaxy Home Mini saw a brief release in South Korea as a pre-order bonus for the Galaxy S20 📱, but the full-sized Galaxy Home never saw the light of day 🌑.

Ballie hasn’t quite reached the “abandonware” status of the Galaxy Home—at least, not yet 👻. It has only been about eight months since Samsung’s last press release claiming an imminent arrival 🏃‍♂️, and the company has marketed Ballie far more publicly than its ill-fated speaker. Perhaps next month will bring a revamped robot with new tricks ✨, or perhaps just another nebulous promise for 2026 🔮. However, after failing to deliver two years in a row, I won’t consider Ballie a real product until I can actually punch in my credit card number to buy one 💳. Even then, Ballie will need to prove it is much more than a cute rolling novelty before it earns my cash 💰.