Xbox World Australia

SUMO OMNI

Manufacturer : SUMO Urban Lounge Gear

Supplier : SUMO Australia

RRP : $199.00

If there’s one regret I have from my days many, many (many) years ago when I worked in the Web Design industry, it’s that I never had the pleasure of working for one of those companies parodied so ably in the Simpsons episode “I am Furious Yellow”. I’m sure you all know the one I mean.. Bart creates a comic named “Angry Dad” which gets turned into a flash based Web Cartoon by some slick soul patch wearing dot-com owner.

When Bart visits the office it’s full of piles of their stock that comes on rolls, all the staff are playing computer games and sitting (or sleeping) on extremely awesome looking office furniture. It’s just waiting to go belly up and you just know that it’s not far away either. That’s the regret I have, that I never worked for a company that went bust so I could steal either an Aeron Chair or some giant arse expensive bean bag the size of a king sized bed! I don’t live with many regrets, but surely that’s one. All that venture capital getting thrown around, ahh they were they days!

Well I don’t have the Aeron chair yet (and at $1300+ I most likely never will) but finally some of the SUMO range of high tech bean bags are finally starting to make their way to Australia and I’m lucky enough to be parking myself on one right now. The SUMO Omni is best explained as a bean bag, but that doesn’t really do it justice. This is no vinyl, fur or denim monstrosity that you may remember having owned in 1984 where the beans went flat after a month and you were forever repositioning yourself to get comfy.

At 5.5 x 4.5 feet in size, made from rip-proof nylon and filled with polystyrene beads it can be used as a floor pillow, shaped like a regular bean bag or contorted into whatever shape it takes to make you cosy. For gaming I found it most comfortable when sitting on it like a regular bean bag but the support it gave was easily far and above any other bean bag that I’ve owned. What’s cool though is that it can be half propped up against a wall or even as a big floor pillow, you simply bash it into the shape that you need. To give it a solid work out for this review, I even dragged it outside for some outdoors reading in the shade and with a quick wipe down it was clean and ready to take back into the XBW gaming den.

It’s a pretty solid unit as while outside, after coming back from getting a drink, my dog was jumping around on it with my three kids and there’s not even a mark on it. Usually when things like this get sent to me, they survive about 20 minutes but this thing came through without a mark (trust me, I’m not exaggerating for the sake of this review, my kids gave it an absolute pounding).

Now the kicker, the SUMO Omni lounge is worth $199, but that includes free shipping from SUMO Australia. So while not cheap, it has the quality to back itself up and feels like it would easily last forever. Sure, at first glance it may look like a giant dog mat, but the fact is that it’s not just a bean bag, but very versatile in that it can adapt to so many different shapes. My only gripe, and this is with regular bean bags, and anything that sits this low on the floor, is that I found it kind of hard to get out of and had to sort of roll out of it. Not a deal breaker and it could also just be because I’m old, um, I mean, older than I used to be!

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