Lego has just announced that the Mindstorm line is not dead; Mindstorms NXT is set for August 2006.
The real news is that Lego consulted the geek community and formed a Mindstorms User Panel, or MUP:
The one key difference between the four panelists and actual Lego staffers: a paycheck. For their participation, Hassenplug and his cohorts received a few Lego crane sets and Mindstorms NXT prototypes. They even paid their own airfares to Denmark. That was fine by Hassenplug. “Pretty much the comment from all four of us was ‘They’re going to talk to us about Legos, and they’re going to pay us with Legos?’” Hassenplug says. “‘They actually want our opinion?’ It doesn’t get much better than that.”Such loyalty isn’t unusual among the fanboys who’ve swooned over Mindstorms since its 1998 debut. Four years after its release, version 2.0 still sells 40,000 units a year at $199 a pop — with no advertising — and has become Lego’s all-time best-selling product. The market is almost evenly split between parents buying the kit for their budding engineers and grown-up geeks who build Mindstorms robots that can scale walls, solve Rubik’s Cubes, or pick blue M&Ms out of a pile.
The kit, due in stores in August, looks nothing like 2.0 and isn’t backward compatible. Users still program the bots from their PCs, but everything else about the experience has been changed. The centerpiece of a Mindstorms kit is the RCX brick, which acts as the robot’s brain. It receives input from sensors and sends instructions to motors, breathing life into plastic-block creatures. The new brain has a 32-bit processor — a huge upgrade over the old 8-bit processor — allowing NXT bots to perform more-complex tasks than their predecessors, like ambling with a near-human gait or reacting to voice commands. The chunky yellow brick in the old kit — which looked like SpongeBob SquarePants — is gone, replaced by a gray rectangle that could be the love child of an iPod and a first-gen Gameboy. The programming language has been revamped, as have the sensors, motors, and I/O ports. As a result, Mindstorms NXT robots look and act far more realistic than their predecessors.