The Fisher-Price toy telephone for adults: Talking Tech podcast

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Hey there, listeners. It's Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. My co-host, Mike Snider, is off today. So, do you remember the Fisher-Price toy phone? Either you owned it when you were a kid, or maybe you were a parent and you gave it to your child when they were younger. It's this cute little phone. It's got a face on the front. It has the rotary dial, or you remember from back in the day, when we had phones that had the rotary dial working. It has for red wheels, all that fun stuff. Fisher-Price is bringing it back. But, they have added a high-tech twist to it. I write about this in a story that you can read on tech.usatoday.com. It's called the Chatter Telephone. And so what it is, is it basically takes the toy phone, from years and years ago, and it has made it capable of taking real phone calls. The phone's available for pre-order at bestbuy.com. It's $60.

Here's how it works. It connects to your phone through Bluetooth, so you can make and receive calls directly from the toy phone. You can also use it as a speakerphone. It's got a button near the front, and you can use it as a speakerphone. It works with both iOS and Android. It also recharges, so you get a charging cable, and you recharge it just like any other device as well.

I actually got to try this out. I got a sample of it. Again, it's a cute device. It's definitely playing to folks' nostalgia. Memories of being a kid, you had this little cute toy phone. Only, of course, it makes real calls. The audio isn't too bad. I felt like at times it wasn't as loud as I would like it to be, both using the receiver on the phone and in speakerphone. You had to turn it up a little bit to really hear well. But it's fun. I kept thinking to myself, this would be fun to use if, say, I need to get involved in a customer service call, or something else where I'm feeling frustrated, and maybe this kind of lightens my mood. Because how can you get mad on a phone call when you're calling through a toy Fisher-Price phone?

The other funny part of this too is I have two kids, and I forget that they're so used to smartphones, that they've really never seen a phone like this before. And it was fascinating to both of them, just the way you dialed with the rotary wheel that spins. But then also the receiver was great too, because they kind of looked at it like, "What is this thing?" And, at one point they were holding it upside down. They're like, "What do I do?" And, it's just funny to look at that and see how much tech has changed over the years. But yeah, it was just great to see them marvel at, this is what phones used to be like a long time ago.

So yeah, you can read more about this Fisher-Price phone, where to get it, all that other fun stuff, on tech.usatoday.com.

Listeners, let's hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, or show ideas, any tech problems you want us try to address? Also, I just thought of this. Are there any older bits of technology that maybe you've shown your kids or you've shown a younger person, and they kind of are fascinated by it, didn't know how to use it, and you just had a fun experience teaching them about how tech was 10, 20, 30 years ago. Let me know about it.

You can find me on Twitter, @brettmolina23. Please don't forget to subscribe and rate us, or leave a review, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. You've been listening to Talking Tech. We'll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Fisher-Price toy telephone for adults