This is a new toy, which is just in from Hong Kong. Essentially it is a little robot hand that is apparently designer for picking up crisps! Certainly crisps are a little bit greasy, so this would keep your hands clean. But there are two features about the design that are worthy of special mention.
Firstly, when you close the jaws on a crisp, the pincers do not squeeze the crisp very hard, no matter how robustly you operate the button which causes them to close. So unlike a normal pair of pliers, where the harder you squeeze the handles, the harder the pliers grip, here the amount of ‘squeeze’ that will be applied to the crisp is limited. The purpose of this of course is to make sure that the pincers do not break the crisp by squeezing too hard. Very clever.
The second design feature is that you can also make the gripping pincers move sideways to each other. Presumably this is so that if you get a small bit of crisp stuck to the end of the pincers, you can use this action to brush it off, without having to use your fingers, which would of course defeat the object, since they would then get greasy!
We have not seen one of these before.
