Yoto Player Review: A nice cube-shaped speaker for kids

A thorny question how much screen time that kids should get it hangs above all the parents like a cloud of rain. She concerns are overwhelmed or not, finding alternative activities for children feels important. There’s a world of games and gadgets designed to free your little ones from the tyranny of the touch screen, but few keep that promise. Enter: Yoto Player.

It’s a wireless speaker, but what sets it apart is that you can buy audio books on physical cards. Your child inserts these cards into the top of the Yoto player to start listening, like inserting a cartridge old school video game consoles. It offers not only audio books, but also reflections and bedtime stories, child-friendly radios, podcasts and soothing sleep sounds. All this is seen without a screen; there’s just a nice display of pixel art that doubles as a clock.

It is aimed at children between 3 and 12 years old, so I asked for the help of my 8 year old daughter to test Yoto Player. She immediately fell in love.

Audio cube super-polished

Yoto gives the player a nice look. The cube is beige, with a wedge on the back, it looks like a small house, if you put it down orally. On the front is a colorful pixel art screen with orange buttons on the top left and right, which act as a custom shortcut (more on them later). Turn it on with the button in the lower right corner.

The edges around the back wedge shape can illuminate different colors for night light, which is a nice advantage. There are speakers on each side, slots on the top to insert cards and a circular indent on the bottom that magnetically connects to the charger. It weighs a little over a pound and is comfortable for kids to handle. With plastic with a gentle backing it seems to survive sticky fingers and a weird fall or two.

My daughter immediately fell in love with the front pixel art, which shows the default current time and changes to show related photos when you play the content. That’s the real draw here: Yoto Player supports a large collection of audio books and each is connected to a physical one plastic card that’s the size of your credit card.

The library is robust, with content like the classic Winnie the Pooh and works by Julia Donaldson for young children Wimpy Kid diary, Treasure Island, and Roald Dahl for the slightly older. The prices of these tickets range from $ 6 to $ 12, which at first seemed expensive to me, but they are comparable to the prices of Audible’s audio books.

The beauty of the card system is that you can simply select the story your child wants to hear and enter it to listen to the card. Each is packed in a pouch with a sticker on the back so you can stick it on the wall. We have an audio collection in the Audible book, but if my daughter wants to hear a story, she has to ask us. The physical cards made with Yoto Player also give the little ones agency.