LeapFrog Text and Learn - Did Toy Rotary Phones Seem Strange In 1930?

via www.engadget.com

(This post from Engadget is about a year old, but I hadn't seen it before. I found it by following a link from Dave Caolo's Twitter Feed. Apparently it looks a lot like the new Microsoft "Kin".)

My kids take their toy phones and pretend to text and take pictures, so it shouldn't be any surprise LeapFrog figured this out and made something they can really type text into. And the fact that it kind of looks like a Blackberry is kind of funny.

But it looks like just another toy with a horrible monochrome screen and lame "educational" games. Why haven't kids' electronic toys progressed much past Speak 'n Spell? It would be way cooler if they came in pairs and you could send messages back and forth.

Besides, my 3 year old uses my wife's iPhone so much, I'm not sure she'd recognize this as something she was supposed to have fun with in the first place.