Wired News on how kids toys keep getting more and more technologically sophisticated, with sixty percent toys for pre-schoolers having some sort of microchip in them. The latest is a line of stuffed animals from a company called Wabi that have built-in cordless phones that parents can call and leave voicemails for their children on:
Once a message arrives to the bear, the toy makes a giggling sound. A child can then retrieve the message by pressing the bear’s right paw.
This sounds like a cute idea at first, but when you think about it, it’s so, so wrong. Kids should be spared the tyranny of having to deal with voicemail for as long as possible, because once you let email and voicemail enter your life, the steady stream of messages that need to be answered never, ever stops.
