Others say...

"Ice Cream Ball"
Great idea, but ice cream quality will never be the same as buying commerical ice cream!

"A mason jar and a marble work better!"
You don't need this questionable product to make ice cream. Just put your pre-chilled ingredients into a clean mason jar, add a clean marble or two and alternate between shaking and rolling the jar around on the floor and putting it into the freezer for a few minutes to keep it cold. Or you can use a gallon plastic ziplock bag and the marbles and squish and squeeze the bag. My kids make ice cream this way all the time. If you are camping just put it into a cooler of ice occasionally to chill it instead of the freezer. It works, it's cheap and easy and it's much easier to clean than this thing!

"We're going back to grocery store ice cream"
We were pleased when my daughter received this as a gift as we had been wondering if they worked and liked the idea of combining exercise with making ice cream and teaching about freezing temperatures etc. Unfortunately we were disappointed. First, if you are at all picky about fat content in your ice cream, realize that you have to use pretty heavy cream to make it work. Secondly, the process is more complicated than just fill and mix and eat...there is a midway change the ice step (oh and my standard-sized ice cubs were too big to fit, making this more complicated). Additionally you are supposed to stop every 10 minutes or so and scrape the newly forming ice cream off the sides of the canister...not as easy as it might seem. Additionally, the actually mixing process is quite laborious. The ball is quite hard and hits kids fingers unpleasantly if rolling back and forth by hand. When we tried the soccer-style approach, we found the ball was really too hard to kick and still have fun with even with sneakers on. Still we tried it twice to be fair...unfortunately, the ice cream was really pretty terrible anyway. If you decide to try it anyway, be careful to get a good seal as one time we leaked rock-salt water all over the place. Fun idea that didn't pan out.

"lots of fun"
I took this to a family reunion and let the kids roll it around the room. We ate ice cream for days! The older kids enjoyed it. The little ones (ages 3-5) got a little bored because it takes longer than they are willing to deal with. The ice cream tasted great and everyone had a good time with it.

"Faulty balls"
I bought the ball last weekend and used it for the first time last night with friends... the seal between the outer container for the ice and the rock salt, and the inner container for the ice cream is faulty. After the 30 + minutes we spent rolling and tossing the ball around we ended up with incredibly salty Grass hopper ice cream. We live in a small town and I can't even return the thing to the store I bought it at... And now, I have a useless 25 lbs bag of rock salt.