FIJIT Friends Interactive Toys

Every parent knows that the delicate years between a girl’s young childhood and her teenage self are a veritable minefield of tears, hormones, expanding interests, and shifting personality. Trying to create toys for that age group is hardly an enviable task, but as the market is massive, so are the attempts to fill that void.

Fun With Willa

This year’s biggest push into the tween market is the Fijit friends – an electronic creature that your daughter can laugh, dance, and chat with.

Totalling four in all, each Fijit has their own aesthetic design, jokes, and are even personality programmed to a tee so that you can find the best fit for a little girl’s entertainment.

The four offerings are relatively simple:

• Willa, the purple, trend setting friend who’s always confident and stylish,
• Sage, the green adventurous friend with a great attitude,
• Logan,who’s blue and sporty and loves animals,
• and the pink Serafina, who’s simply described as the sweetie-pie friend.

All are cute little alien-looking critters with amorphous bodies covered in a soft, squishy rubber skin and silly ears that move (and can be accessorized with the addition of further purchases to expand the Fijit’s looks). Complete the look with an LED eyes and face that flash periodically and you have an almost painfully cute creature designed to appeal to every little girl’s innate “awwww” gene. But what, exactly, does a Fijit do? Here are some helpful hints:

Willa

Fijit friends Design Features

Here are some of the basics about the design of these new toys.

• They have a  head and body that turn, bounce, wiggle, and move to better stir the imagination.
• The LED face and eyes offer a great illusion of expression and movement, so it’s easy to pretend that the Fijit is actually talking to you.
• A convenient home mode that allows you to control whether you want to dance, chat, or joke with your electronic pal can be accessed with both simple phrases and an easy to use button of the back of the toy itself.
• Dance mode can both groove to four songs individualized for each Fijit or they can sense the beat to music of your choosing and move as the song and style dictate. A Fijit’s movements are surprisingly complex, involving vibrations, rolling, and turning to really make it seem like she’s dancing with you!
• Chat mode allows you to carry on a conversation with your Fijit with the simple use of over 30 commands that can result in up to 150 different replies from your Fijit.
• Your Fijit can tell jokes unique to each design and the perfect intellectual level to make every girl giggle and parent groan.
• Chirp mode offers secret functions and unlockable features that can be accessed through the Fijit website like new dance moves and fun sounds to impress and entertain.
• Sleep mode is easy to enter, saves batteries, and can even act as a nightlight.

Common Complaints About Fijit friends

Sage

No toy is perfect. Here are some of the downsides of the Fijit friends.

• While the soft, rubbery skin that covers the Fijit is great to touch and hold, adding a nice tactile feature to the already impressive toy, its durability leaves something to be desired. Easy to rip or tear, the skin makes actually playing with the Fijit a little too challenging. Besides that, the material also attracts all kinds of lint and dirt and keeping it clean is a real challenge. (There’s even a “How do I clean my Fijit” section on the website addressing this issue.)
• The voice activated software is a bit buggy, often requiring you to repeat words or hearing the incorrect commands. If the commands are spoken clearly and slowly, about two feet away from the toy and in a quiet room, there are relatively no problems – but that’s a really specific set of limitations for a toy to have.
• The toy’s verbal responses are often muddled and hard to understand, making the idea of trying to chat with it a bit less appealing than you’d think. What’s more, the allowed response time for you to reply to the toy is often too short if you’re too busy trying to figure out what your Fijit friend said to know what to say next.

Fijit friends: Overall Reactions

While the idea of marketing to the preteen set is a good one, Mattel may have missed the mark with the Fijit. While it’s a fun and entertaining toy, its appeal definitely skews toward younger girls and not the coveted tween set they have been marketing toward. Its limited options means that older girls will quickly tire of playing with it and the Fijit will more than likely become just another knick knack cluttering the shelves and driving moms nuts.

For younger girls, however, it’s a decidedly fun toy. The dance mode alone is entertaining enough to keep their attention for awhile, and the extra features are sure to keep them occupied. Having unlockable secret chirps on the website is another smart idea, adding extra features to keep things interesting.

What would be even more impressive would be if one or more Fijit friends could interact with each other, building in yet another level of play and an incentive to buy more than one. This, however, is not a feature in the current model and there don’t seem to be any indications of including it if the toy should move into further reincarnations.

Overall, it’s hard to say exactly where Mattel thought they were going with this idea pr even exactly what the Fijit friends are supposed to be. In the official product description, it says that the Fijit friends were “created when a gooey science experiment was brought to life by the power of music.”

While we’re not entirely sure what that means, the end result is a fun toy that shows a marked leap forward in interactive robotic technology. While the crowd for this toy may end up being younger than Mattel intended, there’s definitely still an audience out there who will appreciate an electronic best friend of their very own. Will your Fijit be sporty, savvy, exciting, or just plain sweet? Why not get one and find out?

If you have a Fijit friend, please leave a review in the comment section below and let us know. If you have any questions or concerns, write a comment below. If you just feel like sharing your wisdom with the world … well, you get the idea – leave a comment below!

Related posts:

1. Review: Razor Rip Rider 360
2. Step2 Neat & Tidy Cottage Review
3. Star Wars Toys Commercial ’77
4. Top Toy Blogs and News @ AllTop
5. Top Christmas Toys 2009 According to Associated Press