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PDAs For Kids
fiftyfly writes "Wired's running a story about the Pixter - a sort of etch-a-sketch/palm love child. At an estimated $50.00 I'm sure someone out there must have had a go at hacking it.
No mention of anyway of getting the drawings off, I'd imagine that would be a good place to start. For $75CAD I'd give it a go, eh?"
http://www.cybikoxtreme.com/
This device was released a few years ago and it is basically a PDA for the younger generation. They go for about $100 CDN here ($65 USD).
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Just looking at the device made me think back to the Speak'n'Spell. I'd guess that this new toy has plenty of power to do the emulation if they feel like offering it (or if someone feels like hacking it). It would be an amusing evolution of emulator technology to have even Fisher Price toys digitally emulating their ancestors.
one of the first steps to hacking this would be to get your hands on some of the ROM expansion packs. On the Go and Learning Fun would be too good choices at $10 each. The interface for connecting to the ROMs would definitely be the easiest way to connect to the toy and get info on/off of it. Someone get some software on it that can read my handwriting and ill buy one.
I think you're wrong on a couple of fronts. At work my group supports about 50-60 palm users. These people alomst all use the palm exclusively for scheduling their appointments and to-do lists. Games are pretty much a sideshow. My palm is used for (in order), my schedule, to do list, contact list, notes, and then for games.
My son also has both a pixter and a gameboy. Both devices are remarkably different. The pixter focuses mostly on educative games and in actuallity hoing the skills necessary for using a PDA. The games are fairly interesting an centered on learning mostly. The anamation cartrige enables the creation of simple cartoon style animation. The gameboy is a pure gaming machine and pretty nice at that. My son uses the gameboy more. But depending on his mood and what kind of activity he wants to do will judge which device he picks. The gameboy is definately the higer energy more intense device, but the pixter is the more engaging thinking and creativity toy.
It's just a MagnaDoodle(TM) that allows you to save pictures to your PC. As for geekifying kids, my own (ages 8, 5, 3 and 1) are already attached to the computer. One of these gizmos would be a clever way to actually give them some "old-fashioned" fun: say "hey, it's your very own computer!" when all they're really doing is drawing. Sure, it costs more than pencil and paper, but my kids probably go through $10 of paper, crayons, coloring books and markers a month, and that's not even counting the time and cost of cleaning off the 3-year-old's "artwork" from our apartment walls! I'd rather give him a stylus than a pencil any day - less damage that way...
;-)
(He's also already trashed the MagnaDoodle I got him for Christmas -- it seems that with enough use, the "writing surface" becomes magnetized, so it doesn't "wipe clean" any more... Another reason why the digital version is better than the analog one...)
As an aside, did you really mean to suggest that the best thing for children aged 4+ is to "give" them "members of the opposite sex" for "old-fashioned fun", or was that just some odd Freudian slip?
That's not my experience at all as a PDA user. I found that my first PDA (a Palm III) became an indispensible part of my life in short order. Over the years I upgraded to newer models and still use my for PDA for mundane tasks because it allows me to perform these mundane tasks more efficiently.
But I also use it as a cellphone , to keep passwords secure, to connect to the Internet, read news, e-books, as a desk and travel alarm clock and for many more things. I don't know if children will really use the device in this article but this mature adult will never grow tired of his PDA.
Does this