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They are very nice...run off 4 AAs for a week

O RLY

Looking around the site you linked to, one easily finds:

Battery Life Up to 9 hours

Welp, that was easy enough to debunk.

So, let's see: your LeapPad2 costs $100, does not have access to a vast array of applications (it is walled in a very tiny garden), has a 5" screen and to top it all off, it doesn't come with rechargeable batteries.

And you wonder "why this one (the Tabeo) is interesting"? Compared to that LeapPad, even a turd with a touchscreen would be interesting.

There's already other products on the market in this space. But I guess this one is interesting because it runs android?

So I'm not a shill, but my kids both have a Leappad. http://www.leapfrog.com/leappad2/ They are very nice...run off 4 AAs for a week or two, and seem pretty indestructible. And its only $100. PRoprietary walled garden, I know, but the apps come either downloadable or via a dedicated SIM-like card. Works well enough for me.

I guess my point is...I don't know what my point is. Maybe the Toysrus one is interesting because its Android? So it can run any android app? But although my kids prefer my iPad I much rather they use a kid-proofed tablet.

My cousin has one of those Leapfrog Tag books. These are the ones in which you have a "pen" which can touch various objects on the pages and produce a sound. It's most often demonstrated as having the "pen" read the words that the child touches. However, the child can often touch animals, cars, trains etc etc and have the corresponding sounds. Out of two children, I have never seen them use the book the way that it is intended, they just touch the pictures repeatedly for the sounds. If I want them to read the book for the words, then you have to take away the pen and use the book as a traditional book.

Besides it's a waste of batteries. IMHO, it's just another way to "outsource parenting." People already outsource the babysitter to TV.

Also these books are damn expensive compared to used books, the ones libraries give away for a $.25 or ones from your friends whose kids have outgrown them.

You mean this Leapfrog Phone ?

Even more to the point, there has been a flash based touchscreen device widely available for over half a decade.

The Leapster by Leapfrog is a Flash only device. You can buy it in any Toys R Us, and has been very successful. It works just fine.

The thing is, it is not new.

The Leapster by Leapfrog is a Flash only device. You can buy it in any Toys R Us, and has been very successful. It works just fine.

Touchscreen flash is over half a decade old. Claiming that flash is impossible on a touch screen is like claiming 64bit is impossible on the desktop.

More to the point. The author is not only an idiot because he isn't smart enough to think of how to make flash work with a touch screen... He is an idiot because there has already been a very successful touchscreen device that is 100% flash. The Leapster by Leapfrog is a Flash only device. You can buy it in any Toys R Us, and has been very successful. It works just fine.

It seems that the current trend by Apple fanboys is to claim that Apple engineers are completely incompetent. Not long ago, it was the claim that Apple engineers were too incompetent to fit a microSD and battery door in an iPod sized device, while basement budget Emprex could fit them in a device half the iPod's size. Obviously this not extends to the iPad. At 50x the size, the Apple fanboys must still believe the Apple engineers are even too incompetent to fit them in that huge device.

Now, we get an article claiming that Apple engineers are so incompetent that it would be IMPOSSIBLE for them to accomplish a task that has been widely available in a child's toy for over half a decade.

My twin boys started using the Leapfrog computer at about 2.5 years old. At 3, they know how to use the mouse and the interface well enough to choose and play the games ! Seriously, 3yo and they can use the mouse (it's a Mac-like 1-click)

They know the alphabet, and love playing the games where you use the keyboard to pick letters. Likewise, they use the arrows to play the puzzle games, and YES, they can do all this at 3 ! They even know how to load carts and turn the thing on (they know how to turn on/off nearly everything though, lol)

http://www.leapfrog.com/gaming/clickstart/

At not even two years old, a child is still totally grappling with training its motor functions. A tiny keboard is a rubbish interface for a child of that age. Using a mouse (a trackpad is no good for this) with child-related software is as much as you can do but at not even two they are too young for this as well. You mistake that the Fisher-Price type stuff looks like a rip-off and is bad but the point is that it's also taken into account creating interfaces that are actually helpful and child-friendly. Get your child some interactive books / systems that are specially targeted at development and which you can sit and do with them. Leapfrog have graded kit from 12-36 months and up in age brackets thereafter. http://www.leapfrog.com/en/families/leapster/leapster_learning0/leapster.html . My 3 and 6 year old have had this stuff from an early age and the ability to use laptops, pcs and Nintendo DS etc. I found that between the ages of 2 to 4 / 5 they still preferred the Leapster etc.

I just hate this attitude that there's some fundamental quality of them that makes them better than today's games. That's just nostalgia talking.

I think text games allow for imagination to blossom, and 3D "shiny" games lend themselves to becoming glorified movies.

Bear with me... It's like the latest commercial from LeapFrog (a computer-learning company): A grown man in a frog costume is behind a table with a bunch of books telling the viewers how much better the LeapFrog Tag(TM) Reading System helps children read, and then a little boy comes up to the table, waves a wand over his LeapFrog book, and the book reads to him. The man asks the boy which book he likes better, the LeapFrog book, or an older book. The boy responds derisively: "That book doesn't talk"
When I first saw that commercial, I was appalled. The boy is just being spoonfed; he's only learning that reading is _hard_ and that talking books are better because you don't have to _think_. I later became appalled that LeapFrog would think that this commercial would appeal to parents. I then later became appalled because I realized that the marketing firm that made the ad must have done their research, and parents really think this is good. /rant

So, a lot of today's games are like the LeapFrog books, where any puzzles are spoonfed because the designers want you to finish the game and buy another title, and you're not required to imagine a little white house. The designers don't _want_ you to imagine stuff, because then you end up falling into an abyss where the level designers forgot to place a wall because you were curious, or you skip a trigger and kill the bad guy before he gives his monologue, and he gives it then anyway. Okay, "give troll to troll" does this too...

Can anyone recommend educational software for the PSP? (Or the GameBoy DS, I am not vested yet.) My young children have done quite well with the LeapPad (can't beat the "screen" resolution) but now that they are writing, they are ready for something else. Their electronic product doesn't impress me: the available titles are fairly redundant to what I have in paper, and the product is weak compared to PSP/DS.

Can anyone recommend educational software for the PSP? (Or the GameBoy DS, I am not vested yet.) My young children have done quite well with the LeapPad (can't beat the "screen" resolution) but now that they are writing, they are ready for something else. Their electronic product doesn't impress me: the available titles are fairly redundant to what I have in paper, and the product is weak compared to PSP/DS.

Didn't I see this technology in Toys R Us about 10 years ago sold as a leap pad? http://www.leapfrog.com/do/findproduct?key=leappad plus&ageGroupKey=grade

Wow, I have never seen anything like it before!

Bad move. These guys may sue them for trademark infringement/dilution, etc. In any case, if I were Intel, there's no way I'd want people to associate my high-tech processors with the above computers.

http://www.leapfrog.com/ All the power of a LeapPad Learning System.

LeapFrog already makes a cell phone for kids that does most of this. Its the leap frog tictalk With parents today no need to beat around the bush. Just come out and say it. And its cheeper too!

LeapFrog already makes a cell phone for kids that does most of this. Its the leap frog tictalk With parents today no need to beat around the bush. Just come out and say it. And its cheeper too!

Let's do away with every game genre that could be influenced by these programs, starting with games aimed at poor, innocent children.

And who's the most guilty? V-Tech and Leap Frog! Those companies need to have criminal charges filed against them, because they're marketing video games designed to brainwash little children!

</sarcasm>

As another poster commented, their "special dot-matrix FLY paper" sounds a lot like Anoto paper, which means you can use the pen to write anywhere, but for it to actually do anything you need to be using official Anoto-licensed paper. It sounds like they've taken Logitech's and Nokia's digital pen concept and combined it with a kiddie-PDA. Interesting idea.

Think they'd incorporate any easter eggs into this thing?

Since the picture isn't a photo but a computer-generated 3D drawing, I don't they've actually built one yet. No mention on their site either.

Because children's books have enjoyed most of these book-related innovations, it's easy to overlook the evolution of "book technology" and the ways in which we're bridging the gap between digital media and the printed page.

Nevertheless, BlackMagic still looks like a View-Master, which will prevent some people from seeing it as a serious innovation. I wonder what it will take for this or (more likely) a different technology to be accepted eventually as a hardware standard by textbook publishers, fine art books, etc.

To put this into a broader context, we've already seen numerous proprietary technologies for making children's books interactive; we also have companion CD-ROMs, online rich media supplements, audiobook alternatives for an increasing number of titles, books bundled with audio recordings, and telephone book reading services offered by libraries. Most of these technologies "liberate" the text by adding sound, while only the multimedia supplements liberate illustrations. Therefore I appreciate BlackMagic's achievement, which, like LeapFrog's LeapPad, localizes the enhancements--as opposed to the CD-ROM (et al) that are inherently detached from the book itself.

Because children's books have enjoyed most of these book-related innovations, it's easy to overlook the evolution of "book technology" and the ways in which we're bridging the gap between digital media and the printed page.

Nevertheless, BlackMagic still looks like a View-Master, which will prevent some people from seeing it as a serious innovation. I wonder what it will take for this or (more likely) a different technology to be accepted eventually as a hardware standard by textbook publishers, fine art books, etc.

To put this into a broader context, we've already seen numerous proprietary technologies for making children's books interactive; we also have companion CD-ROMs, online rich media supplements, audiobook alternatives for an increasing number of titles, books bundled with audio recordings, and telephone book reading services offered by libraries. Most of these technologies "liberate" the text by adding sound, while only the multimedia supplements liberate illustrations. Therefore I appreciate BlackMagic's achievement, which, like LeapFrog's LeapPad, localizes the enhancements--as opposed to the CD-ROM (et al) that are inherently detached from the book itself.

I can feel a new wave if ISAs coming through.

I hope so, but I haven't heard of anything free in practice lately other than MIPS minus unaligned load/store patented instructions. Intel has ratcheted down the license fee for ARM ISA to literally next to nothing because they are competing against those free MIPS subsets.

The ISA is insignificant in comparison to cache architecture in all the heavy-duty applications I care about. A/V codecs, which lend themselves directly to hardware a lot better than huristic search does, as far as I'm concerned, are only good for the, erm, health benefits.

Can't wait for Red Star, though, I want solar powered speech toys.

There is a better alternative: LeapPad Learning System. Go to Target sometime and play with one in the store. They're very cool for kids.