Blackberry = Crackberry? The iPhone is more addictive and targeting children! Well, maybe that wasn't Apple's intention, but they did make their phone so easy even tiny kids can use it. My brother tipped me to a New York Times article on parents who use their iPhones to pacify whining offspring, and the toddlers who consider the phone to be the best toy in the toybox.
Instead of writing about how impressed I am with the tiny kids' abilities (and I am), or how depressed I am about yet another video addiction in chidren's lives (ditto), I'll use the context to mention our own toddler/computer story.
One day Heather discovered two-year-old Faith sitting at the computer, typing away in their Open Office word processing program. She assumed Jon had set it up for her, but that was not the case.
No one knows how she did it. This is no consumer-friendly iPhone, nor even Windows, but a Linux-based system only a geek could love. Go, little geeklet!
An example of what can happen if you let your kids use your iPad:
http://www.courant.com/technology/sns-ap-us-tec-apple-expensive-smurfberries,0,343228.story
Has the world gone mad?
[T]the option to buy $59.99 worth of Smurfberries at a time remains. Capcom spokesman Michael Larson says "Smurfs" is no different from other games in this regard, and the bulk purchasing option is useful to adult "power players."
Adults playing a Smurf game? And spending that kind of money on ... Smurfberries?
Don't tell me the creators didn't foresee children playing the game and unknowingly spending lots of real money. Why else combine push-button (pardon the anachronism) purchases with child-attracting characters?
For comparison, it takes less than the cost of those Smurfberries to purchase, through World Vision International, enough life-saving bed nets to protect three families from the ravages of malaria.
