Vivid Imaginations 81812 "PIXL Character Flow Interactive Digital Toy

Kids love this loads of fun especially if you have more to join up.

Multiplayer maps

You have to catch the right age - old enough to handle the workings and young enough to feel it is too basic. I guess that to be 7 to 8 years.The other need, is to have contact with other owners, for the interaction.It is not compelling as a stand alone toy competing with the toy box and other electronic devices. I thought the portability (into a pocket) would be the lead attraction, but my granddaughter has ditched it quite quickly

Well at first my grandson did not quite know what to do with this PIXL. There are six to collect in total and I was sent the blue one called FLOW. Flow's characteristic is that he loves water. Flow comes with animations and these are displayed on the screen to depict their personality.I would suggest that you need a really vivid imagination to get the best out of this little PIXL. I would suggest that this is more suited to eight years plus, as it can be a bit of a challenge to work it out. With one button which if you hold it down displays the menu, you can move through the menu by clicking the button and then double click when you have chosen.The website is a help to figure everything out and ideally it will provide more fun value if the children have one each and they can transfer pictures to each other's PIXL'S. I think with this perseverance is definitely the name of the game.

A Christmas gift

Hmm okay, I preface this review by saying that I may have given it to the wrong age range - My 12 year old daughter just thought it was a bit silly compared to her constant companion yes, you guessed it, her mobile phone, my Six year old really struggled to understand how it worked. I spent some time with her on it and we looked at the website etc to try to get some insight but frankly I was also slightly non plussed by it all. Now it may be that it works better when combined with other characters in the same series, and likewise I suspect this leans more heavily towards the 8,9,10 year old market so I may be being overly harsh but it really didn't float anyone's boat in the family so unfortunately was not a massive hit as overly fiddly to use and with too little 'payback' for effort compared to say an app or something like that. Perhaps the retro eighties/nineties market will like it?

The toy has a single button, which you press & hold for the menu, single-click to advance through the menu options and double-click to select. The menu options are represented by cryptic icons rather than a description, and don't seem intuitive at all, but my son figured it out quickly by going to the website, watching the videos and reading the FAQs.He used an app on the PIXL Creator website to write his name - you can also draw pictures - and transferred it to the toy. The one-way transfer from the PIXL Creator online app to the toy is effected by the app producing a series of rapid black/white flashes (kinda like visual Morse code) which is caught by the sensor on the back of the toy, which you have to hold up to the screen (or rest on it) for the duration of the sequence. It's not immediate but not too long either - it seemed to take less than a minute. Once the transfer was complete we saw my son's name scroll across the screen, then disappear. He couldn't figure out how to get the device to replay the animation of his name and that's where he left it.There are a few other things you can do with the toy, like playing rock-paper-scissors - albeit with slightly unclear images given the low pixel count of the display - and displaying various emojis. If a friend has another toy from the same range, they can touch the round metal circles on the side together to transfer pictures between the toys directly.Given the range of far more intuitive and functional toys available to children - not to mention the Android tablets selling on Amazon for £30 - I'm not sure I see kids persevering with this. My son moved on after less than 30 minutes.

The idea of this seemed a little limited to begin with - would a child today really bother with an LED monochrome display toy when a phone holds an entire computer? The answer, as it turns out, was 'no'. My nephew (computer geek, age 8) had no interest in this but I forced him to use it anyway. The app was easy enough to use, and the transfer method was interesting. However the toy itself simply doesn't do enough, ever for a few pounds. The technology is no longer interesting, the only appeal I can see is for those who aren't technically minded....but then those kids would not be sitting around making up animations in the first place. It seems to be a toy without an audience. A more advanced version with built in mic, touchscreen etc would have a chance, but then the price would be a LOT more and again, it would still struggle to find buyers.Overall I think this is a toy that's about 10 years out of date, despite the fact it's well made and works fine.