In Singapore, you can buy from any LEGO store at SGD499 (without discount). Alternatively, buying online from Amazon.com at USD279.99 plus the postage to Singapore of SGD25!!! Do your maths and you will find SGD100+ of savings.
LEGO Mindstorm has a lot of electronic components. So, I was concerned about warranty. You may want to check on this if you are not buying in US... To my surprise, most stores in Singapore do not provide warranty as well. They said that they can help me to claim faulty parts from LEGO official website.
OK, now about the outcome. My son managed to build the LEGO pretty fast. Here's the first "Shooter-Bot" that my son constructed within 1-2 days. There are four robots that you can build from the Mindstorm. One of them is guided well in a printout. The others are shown from the computer screen. I find the guide on the screen too small and hard to follow.
Once the hardware is built and connected, the next challenge is programming. The software does not work under my Mac OS X computer, but requires a Windows based machine with Bluetooth. Here's a screenshot. The Graphic User Interface is simple. As you can see, the whole programming is graphic based. I am surprised that my ten-year-old who has no programming background can manage this on his own. However, I will not say it's easy. I expect a step-by-step guide but to my surprise, there is none!
How did we overcome this? Thankfully, my son learned and did most of the programming by himself. He experienced, tried many times until he knew how to make it work. He showed me his progress, and asked me questions from time to time. What I did was to support, and to find him a better guide.
The following guide book is very helpful. Examples and illustrations given are more complete. For example, my son could not perform the shooting from his "Shooter-Bot" at the beginning. This book helped him to overcome this problem. There are more suggestions, ideas and hints offered in this book too.
This guide book looks relevant too. Check this out.
Here's my son with his gadgets. His exam is just around the corner, but he will find time for this gadget by completing school work first as usual.
Update on Sep 2013:
Many people asked me about NXT 3 and that they can no longer buy NXT 2. Yes, most stores stopped selling NXT 3. In Singapore, the price just went up 20%+ to SGD630 from SGD500 previously. You can buy from US through Amazon, but I heard that free Shipping to Singapore is not applicable to this item. Here's the link to NXT3..
I read that NXT3 has an additional sensor a better ARM processor.
