A television tucked in a cuddly toy, a mobile phone dressed up as a teddy bear and a nanny robot are among the new gadgets targeting an untapped high-tech market: kids.
IT and consumer electronics companies gathered at the CeBIT fair said that with the threat of saturation in the telephone and TV markets, they were looking to children to rev up the sector.
Taiwanese electronics maker Hannspree (瀚斯寶麗) announced at the event that it would launch a television set in Europe next month targeted at children.
PHOTO: AP
"The idea was to create an `emotional' television so that the child truly has `his' TV that does not look like the others," Bruno Choquet, sales director of Hannspree France, said of the huggable TV, which has already been released in the US and Asia.
The screen, the size of a small standard television, is implanted in the body of a plush giraffe, elephant or lion. A version aimed primarily at boys comes in plastic, in the form of a firetruck or a helicopter.
Twelve different models are on offer, priced at between 300 and 400 euros (US$360 and US$480).
Hannspree, which also makes televisions for adults shaped like a basketball or a plant, forecasts sales of 500,000 units in Europe by the end of this year, Choquet said.
Catering to children is a way of "creating a new market, even if it its still just a niche," he said.
"But it could take off -- children are more taken with technology than we are," Choquet said.
In terms of mobile phones, no major manufacturer has dared to produce children's cell phones due to the still unclear effect of their radiation. The WHO, however, has urged parents for caution's sake not to overexpose their children.
Nevertheless, a few companies are seeking a way forward with kids' phones, largely packaged as security or monitoring devices.
Taiwanese firm i-Care Telecom Inc (
"The bear has four paws and each paw has a dial-speed number which has been registered by the parents, with drawings for the father, the mother, friends and the teacher," marketing director June Yiching Yeh said.
The company has voluntarily reduced the amount of radiation of the handset, which also has two emergency buttons for children to call for help.
I-Care Telecom expects to see 100,000 phones sold in Europe this year.
The release of a simplified child's mobile known as BabyMo in France in January last year, however, provoked protests by several child protection groups and led to the phone being pulled from the shelves.
Another attempt at appealing to parents, this time from the Japanese electronics group NEC Corp, involves a babysitting robot called Papero Childcare.
Approximately 40cm tall, the multicolored electronic nanny that appears to smile and open its eyes wide in a friendly expression is programmed to watch over a group of children and play games with them.
"If the child is in the room and the mother is in the kitchen, she can call Papero with her mobile phone and talk directly to her child, through the robot which has a camera, and she can see the child's image," Hiroto Ito, an NEC marketing executive said.
Meanwhile firms such as Vtech Holdings Ltd of Hong Kong and Oregon Scientific Inc have had some success marketing pint-sized educational computers.
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