Amazon Announces New Geeky Toy List

Mattel's Barbie Digital Dress

Sometimes I’m just a big kid — and I love how Amazon’s created a special page with their “top picks” for new holiday gifts. (For a shortcut, just point your browser to tinyurl.com/AmazonToyList ) And last week Amazon finally announced their 2013 picks — adding that for the first time ever, it’s including toys that were voted on by “Amazon Moms”, a free program that offers discounts to parents on supplies from their children. Amazon’s goal, of course, is to create what they’re calling “a one-stop destination for holiday shoppers.” But it’s still fun to browse through their selections…and window shop for all the fun toys!

For example, did you know that a large Kindle Fire HD (with an 8.9-inch screen) now costs just $229? It’s one of Amazon’s top gift suggestions in their “Electronics” category (of course) — though it’s competing with nine different Furbies. But the coolest electronic gadget is, strangely enough, a new digital Barbie Doll from Mattel. She’s wearing a dress with real flashing LED lights, “combining fashion, sound-activation and on-trend technology” (according to Barbie’s web page on Amazon.) Little girls can punch in their own rhythms, or use one of Barbie’s built-in light shows — and here’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear. “Barbie doll’s black dress uses a 4.5 square inch resistive touch panel and 114 tri-color LEDs…”

Amazon’s also selling — and I’m not kidding — an Angry Birds Advent Calendar. There’s little gifts behind each square, and the game comes with little Angry Birds that you can actually shoot at stacks of little blocks — using a real-life version of that catapult from the Angry Birds phone app! “Now you can bring the Angry Birds experience from your smartphone to real life,” explains the web page at Amazon, which identifies it as one of the best gifts for children of 2013. It’s also an Amazon exclusive, and according to at least one reviewer on Amazon, “If you are a fan of Angry Birds, you absolutely MUST have this set. It is so adorable!”

Angry Birds Advent Calendar

Amazon’s also selling a speaker that you can plug in to your Kindle Fire that’s shaped like Minnie Mouse! It’s got a standard speaker jack, so it works with any audio source, and its web page on Amazon promises a “size-defying sound”. There’s also one shaped like Iron Man from the Avengers — or Captain America, and even Spongebob Squarepants.

And I thought it was cool that now you can even buy your daughter a pink journal that’s protected by digital technology. It only opens when its owner speaks a password into a microphone — and the journal even uses voice-recognition technology to make sure that the password was spoken by the right person! It’s manufactured by Mattel, and the Password Journal also comes with an “invisible ink pen” — so girls can write messages which can only be seen when they’re light up with the journal’s built-in ultraviolet light. And behind the journal (built into its pink plastic case), there’s a hidden “secret compartment” which has its own second password. Girls can even record a greeting, which is played back every time they open it up!

Mattel's Password Journal

But the most exciting thing about Amazon’s “Holiday Toy List” is the fact that they’ve incorporated one of my all-time favorite Amazon features — the “Lightning Deals”. Every day for a few hours, they sell a small quantity of a specific item at a big discount. Amazon tracks exactly how many seconds are left for the offer, and what percentage of the item has already been sold! (Right now they’re offering a 40% discount on Lego Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles — a hardcover book giving you all the backstory on your that little Yoda “minifig” from Lego — and with 20 minutes and 43 seconds left to go, they’ve already sold off 47% of them.) Like I said, sometimes I’m just a big kid — especially when it comes to cool, cutting-edge toys.

And now Amazon’s collected them all together into one place — and started selling them at a discount!

For a shortcut, just point your browser to
tinyurl.com/AmazonToyList

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