Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought my son the Fisher-Price iXL for his 4th birthday. See my review on that one, but the long story short, after 3 weeks of waiting for it to be useable, I took it back. I liked the Leapster Explorer, but will not tolerate the excessive advertising and consumerism pet game. Wasn't crazy about their software choices for the 3-4 year old crowd either. Demoed all of them and had my son try them as well. He liked the Mobigo immediately... The graphics are nice, the goal setting in games looks fun. He can handle it fine for most games on easy. He loves it, and he has reached for it more in two days than the iXL that he had for three weeks. Yeah, it's educational enough. I don't expect some handheld toy to replace his mom or me reading and talking to him, so I stopped stressing if the v-tech "curriculum" was as good as the Leapfrog's. It seems plenty educational, and more fun. It is a toy, after all. Screen doesn't have a cover (like the iXL), and takes carts, but was much cheaper than the other two systems as well. I also don't think the iXL software would engage anyone over 5. The Explorer would have been a nice choice, but the Leaplets sound like a money pit, and by the time he would age into enough of their software, there would be something else around by then. He can have an ipod shuffle of something for his mp3's, so I won't miss that aspect of the Fisher-Price (on which I still wouldn't be able to put mp3's right now even if I didn't return it.) Drawbacks - the QWERTY keyboard is hard for him to slide out sometimes. The screen has no cover without the case. With no stylus, he won't get writing practice, but we have plenty of paper and pencils in our house. While I think a physical keyboard is nice, it's probably no more or less cutting edge as a stylus for introducing kids to electronics. This one is priced right, and has been a great purchase for us.