Text & Learn
© 2009 LeapFrog
This chunky green and white BlackBerry-like toy is powered by three AAA batteries. It combines a responsive QWERTY keyboard with an LCD screen and clear speech. While it won’t tweet or make calls, it can make exploring the relationship between letters and their sounds entertaining. For example, if you press K, you hear "K as in Karate Kick”, while a bear does a routine on the screen. There’s also a pretend calendar feature, and a letter matching drill where you try to pop letter bubbles by finding letters, as fast as possible. There are two volume settings; the loudest is acceptable for car trips. While it is designed to model a Blackberry or PDA, the bright green and white colors and one color LCD screen give it away. It’s a toy. Yet, to a child, nothing can ever replace the look of terror on mom or dad’s face as they set up an appointment on your real PDA with your boss. For $22, it's hard to go wrong with this talking letter toybox.
$22, Smart Toy
Teaches: reading, letter recognition, shapes, directions, calendars
CTR Rating: 90%