Girl and Boy Toys

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

I adore having daughters in every respect but one: we have drastically different tastes in toys. When Zoe was born almost 11 years ago, I truly believed I would raise her with no gender bias. So I tried to give my precious daughter, and later her unparalleled sisters Ella and baby Clementine, the kinds of things I enjoyed as a lad--plastic dinosaurs, soldiers, guns that shoot real projectiles, and of course anything that involves a remote control. In other words, the fun stuff.

But it never really worked. I'll never forget the look my girls gave me when I proudly presented them with their first Hot Wheels Criss-Cross Crash Set. It was probably the same look I gave them when they took a perfectly good set of wooden building blocks and used them to make a day-care center rather than, say, a castle or a fort or a killer-gladiator death-match megahurt arena. Needless to say, I have yet to follow up with the awesome Hot Wheels Crashers 2 Backwoods Bomb Truck. I mean, why set myself up for that kind of disappointment?

So it was with some trepidation that I brought home a pair of Cybikos. While the device won't be sold until March 20 (online only at www.cybiko.com) I had been dying to test one ever since I saw a photo. Your typical Cybiko looks like a walkie-talkie with a teensy typewriter keyboard cloned onto it, only cooler, since it comes in four translucent colors (if you count clear and black as colors, that is). Its primary function is wireless chat--you peck out messages on the keyboard and beam them to any other Cybiko users who happen to be around. While the device's range is 300 ft., each has a kind of repeater built in, so that a message can be relayed over great distances--if you could somehow assemble a chain of users every few hundred feet. Such an ad hoc local wireless network could theoretically hold up to 99 daughters. A bigger limitation, however, may be its price: $149 per unit is pretty steep.

While the ability to chat on a wireless walkie-talkie alone might make it worth the money for some, I was more excited by the other stuff that the Cybiko promises to do. The Chicago-based Cybiko company calls the device an "entertainment system" because it aspires to be a new gaming platform, like the Game Boy only better, since you can connect Cybiko to your PC and download a free game every day from its website, says the company. Chess, darts--wireless darts, how cool is that!--billiards, poker and dozens of other games are promised, which you can play wirelessly against your Cybiko-toting pals. I was particularly taken with the idea of CyLandia, which features a virtual creature that's like Pokemon except that you can beam it to other users. (Indeed, if you don't take care of it, it will supposedly "flee" to any open Cybiko.)

So how did my real-life progeny like these whizzy entertainment systems? Remember those films in health class that showed how rats will give up food and water for certain addictive drugs? My kids made those rats look like teetotalers. This was especially amazing given that the prerelease models I was testing weren't even close to fully functional--only the chat functions worked reliably. Also a shoot-'em-up game, which Ella reported was a big hit with "the popular boys." For some reason, that made me feel good.

Learn more about Cybiko at the company website, www.cybiko.com Questions for Quittner? E-mail him at [email protected]