Digest note. We have not tested the Loona robot dog ourselves. This page condenses published third-party reviews in our own words; sources are linked on the device page. TESTV’s hands-on and the Bilibili walk-through are Chinese-language video reviews; the detailed mobility and cloud-versus-local testing comes from a Chinese buyer-platform review, and no Western long-term owner review was available to us.
What it is. Loona, sold under the Realbotix name, is a wheeled robot dog for indoor play and company: 21 cm long, about 1 kg, with a 2.4-inch LCD face, six servo motors for nods and paw movements, a 720p RGB camera plus 3D-ToF for vision, a ring microphone array for sound-source location, and a quad Cortex-A53 with an M4 co-processor described as roughly 5 TOPS of on-board compute (Bilibili feature walk-through; the Zhihu demo article lists the same core parts). The cloud features require Wi-Fi or a phone hotspot, and a companion app handles network setup, face enrollment, block programming and the remote camera (Zhihu). Pricing is inconsistent across sources: TESTV’s 2023 episode mentions an original price of 3,299 yuan, the Zhihu article quotes a 2,999-yuan street price on JD.com with a 3,299-yuan bundle that adds the charging dock, and SMZDM’s 2026 round-up recalls new units at just above 3,200 yuan.
What reviewers like. TESTV’s floor test says the animal read is convincing: expressions and body language feel pet-like, the big-eye interaction earns real fondness, and the prop games - laser pointer, red-cloth bullfight, ball - are low-effort fun, with the robot driving itself back to its dock when the battery runs out. The Bilibili walk-through is most useful on architecture: visual and speech recognition and motion response run on the local chip, it states, so most functions work without a network; it also lists obstacle avoidance, object tracking, graphic programming whose blocks chain speech, touch, avoidance and face recognition, and a plan to support Home Assistant and an open character editor. Dealmoon’s buyer-platform review tested the mobility on hard floors: patrol near 1 m/s, thresholds up to 1.5 cm cleared, short-pile carpet without steering slip, twenty minutes of continuous running without heat-related power drop-off, and Mecanum wheels turning around in a few square metres of furniture. It adds voiceprint and face memory that distinguishes family members, remote patrol with two-way audio, crying and barking alerts, and frequent firmware updates after the unit arrived. Zhihu’s demo walked through face enrollment, visual Q&A (ask it what you are wearing and it answers), shooting the ball into a goal, AI drawing by voice command and a driver’s-eye camera view.
What they don’t like. TESTV’s hour on the floor is the harshest useful report: outdoor following flattened the battery in just over half an hour, turning the robot into a device trailing a USB cable to a power bank; every paw raise is a plastic palm slapping the floor, which the episode calls repeatedly too loud for an upstairs apartment; there is no desktop mode and no edge detection, so tables and stair homes are fall risks; of the roughly ten games, the fetch routine recognizes the ball only about a third of the time and needs it waved under its nose first, and the laser only engages within 30 cm (the distance is Zhihu’s, from its own demo); the ChatGPT layer, set to preset characters, mostly answers off-topic. Novelty in that household was gone in about six days, and the episode lands its subjective composite score at 3.7. The promotional-leaning pieces carry none of that: the Zhihu article ends in a store link, calls ChatGPT usage “completely free” without addressing whether policy holds, and Bilibili’s piece is a feature tour with no runtime, charging or failure data - its Home Assistant and character-editor support was only planned when published. Dealmoon adds app and speech-recognition hiccups of its own, and its count of 140-plus dynamic expression sets does not square with Bilibili’s claim of more than 700 expressions and actions; the sources are inconsistent and neither is a factory spec sheet.
Longevity and lock-in. Loona is a two-layer product and the reviews draw the line in the same place. On the device: Bilibili claims most functions run offline, and Dealmoon’s test confirms motion commands and face personalization survive a dropped connection - but conversation runs on the vendor’s cloud GPT-4o and semantic quality degrades noticeably offline, and Zhihu states plainly that no Wi-Fi or hotspot means none of the cloud play at all. Whether the ChatGPT access stays free is unanswered by every source. The power numbers need the most care because three of them fight: the Zhihu article quotes an official 2-to-4-hour runtime, the vendor tutorial blog cited alongside it says about 1.5 hours of active play with roughly three hours to a full wired charge and 2-3 days of standby, and TESTV measured just over half an hour before outdoor following shut it down - while TESTV’s dock recharge took about 1.5 hours, which does not match the vendor’s wired figure either. Treat all of these as claims, not measurements. The dock matters to the price: Zhihu’s comparison of the plain unit at 2,999 yuan against the dock bundle at 3,299 makes the charging base a paid option, and TESTV’s auto-return only works with it present. Update health is currently a plus - Dealmoon received frequent firmware after purchase - but SMZDM’s retention checklist makes continued official OTA cadence and community modding the two questions to settle before ordering, and puts Loona in the group of overseas-based brands whose mainland after-sales path it calls unfriendly; none of these reviews reports an actual repair quote for this robot. The residual-value question has already been answered once: SMZDM’s 2026 round-up found second-hand listings at 1,500-1,900 yuan against new units just above 3,200, the owners’ reasons ranging from “played twice” to “the kid didn’t like it”, and the roundup is careful to say these are asking prices, not sales. The users who kept it, per the same piece, are the ones who turned it into a wandering room-to-room camera for watching the house. Demand at launch, for context: Zhihu notes the crowdfunding page moved over 1,000 sets within three hours.
Our judgment. Buy Loona for what the three hands-on reviews agree it is: an expressive indoor plaything with genuine agility, a self-returning charge routine and a camera you can send on patrol - and, if Bilibili’s claim holds, one of the few pets in this class that keeps most of its tricks when the internet drops. Do not buy it as a conversationalist; every source that tested the chat layer called it off-topic, and that half is rented from the vendor’s servers. And price in the decay: six days of novelty in TESTV’s house and resale asking prices near half of new tell you what other owners experienced. If the intended owner is a child, the buyer-user mismatch SMZDM’s checklist warns about is precisely what produced those listings.
Who should skip it. Anyone planning outdoor walks - half an hour of following is what TESTV got before the power bank came out. Stair homes and desk play: the robot has no fall-edge awareness and no desktop mode. Households with noise-sensitive downstairs neighbours: the paw-slapping was flagged repeatedly. And anyone buying a gift expecting years of use - this reviews as a days-long toy with a watchman-camera second life, not a pet.