Photo Fun Learning Smart Screen Intelli-Table

Photo Fun Learning Smart Screen Intelli-Table

Fisher Price/Mattel, 6 months +

Toy has lots of ways for the child to interact. It took me quite some time to figure out most of the ways to make it make noise.

The toy can be staged to the child: legs can be removed for children who are not yet standing.

This toy is hard on batteries (3 C-cells). The motor is fairly mechanically noisy. The toy has a reasonable variety in terms of noises and tunes it will play but it will get repetative.

Alex was very fond of this toy: he would drape himself over it to get at all the controls. Once we added the legs, it provided an additional motivation for him to stand himself up as well as a platform to hold him up as he moved around the room (the legs slide reasonably well on hardwood).

Unfortunately the toy suffered from three problems:

• it is heavy on batteries, meaning there were several multi-week periods when the toy was dead. There isn't much of a way to play with the toy if it isn't turned on.
• the toy suffered a broken leg when an adult inadvertently fell on it. Mattel was unable or unwilling to sell us a set of legs for the toy. Fortunately one of Alex's grandparents was able to re-attach the leg.
• the toy suffers from mechanical weaknesses. The mechanism which winds the photos of the alphabet objects has become slightly fouled; it won't go past 'G' now. The toy occasionally would go psychotic, doing nothing but making the pig "oink" noise over and over and over until the toy was turned off. It would also occasionally freeze with all the display lights turned on and remain so until power-cycled. Several of the toy's switches in the selectors and buttons are either intermittantly broken (or worse, only intermittantly working).

All of this is a shame, since now that Alex is 18 months we were hoping that the toy would be a good way of starting to insinuate the alphabet into his head. However since it doesn't work, the toy will probably be withdrawn from service soon.

Until the toy started to suffer from mechanical problems (many of which were originally misdiagnosed as dying batteries), we thought this a good toy. As it is, it is merely a good idea that needs some enhancements.