Toy (Fair) Story

As a reporter for PC World, I've covered scads of trade shows at New York's Javits Center: PC Expo, LinuxWorld Expo, and Seybold Seminars, among others. And now Toy Fair 2000?

Yes indeed--advance word had it that the toy industry's venerable trade show would get wired this year, with a profusion of Web-enabled, computer-enhanced playthings. And as a former small boy, I couldn't turn down the opportunity to see the toy industry's latest and greatest.

But judged purely as a technological affair, last week's Toy Fair 2000 was ho-hum. True, there were some tech toys on display, and others were undoubtedly previewed at top-secret sales meetings. But I came away with the sense that this won't be the year that America's toy boxes go completely high-tech.

Compared to raucous computer shows such as Comdex, Toy Fair is a surprisingly sedate affair, with little in the way of attention-getting entertainment and (I'm sorry to say) few giveaways. Instead, there are thousands and thousands of toys, and-eerily, no kids. (I thought I spotted a small girl on a tricycle at one point, but then I noticed that she wasn't moving and her skin had a plastic sheen.)

Most of the high-tech activity took place in TechnoPlay@ToyFair, a small room crammed into a corner of the Javits Center's basement. (It was a fraction of the size of the football field-size doll pavilion upstairs.) A startling percentage of the playthings in TechnoPlay were low-tech or no-tech items: pinball machines, radio-controlled cars, even inflatable Pokémon furniture. And some of the products with a real relation to computers--such as mouse pads adorned with photos of wrestlers--were, um, a little less than revolutionary.

Aibo and His Offspring

Of the truly techy toys, the one that drew the most enthusiastic throngs wasn't new: it was Sony's Aibo, the robotic dog introduced in May of last year. Like a real dog, the frisky Aibo scampers about, wags his tail, plays with a ball, and barks. Unlike most real dogs, he sports a 64-bit RISC processor, 16MB of memory, an infrared motion sensor, and a slot for Sony's Memory Stick removable storage.

Aibo costs $2500; a PC interface kit is $450 extra. I could see Richie Rich buying one, but I have a hunch that most have probably been acquired by gadget-happy grownups with too much cash on their hands. Still, Sony says that 10,000 new Aibos are being shipped to stores, after the initial production run sold out last year.

And soon, you won't need to be a big spender to pick up a cybercanine: the Toy Fair hosted a litter of Aibo clones at prices as low as $30, including Tiger's Poo-Chi, Silverlit's i-Cybie, and Tekno, from the wonderfully named Manley Toys. All look strikingly like Sony's pup; details on what they can do were scarce, but it's safe to assume their specs aren't quite as cutting-edge as Aibo's.