VTech V-Smile: Prepare to Frown

The VTech V-Smile TV learning system was advertised as the ultimate must have learning toy of the season. The commercial showed children playing well designed educational games that they immensely enjoyed. Not to deny my child anything, I like many parents, purchased the VTech V-Smile for my son. I was not thrilled with the product for a few reasons.

First the quality of the graphics is very poor. Though, not an expert in video gaming technology, I would guess the system has an eight bit graphics card similar to the original NES. For the nearly 40$ I paid for the system (plus almost 20$ per game) I would have expected better quality graphics. The graphics should have been on par with 16 bit or 64 bit video game systems.

The games themselves were poorly laid out. Often it was difficult to understand the objective of the game and there was not as much "learning value" as I would have expected. The games were difficult for my child to play and not quite appropriate for the age group listed on the package.

Aside from that the VTech V-Smile controller does not perform well during the game. It is a well designed controller for a small child with the flexibility of being adjusted for right and left handed children, however, during game play the controller does not perform in an intuitive way. It is often difficult to maneuver characters on the game boards and highly frustrating for small children who lack the fine motor skills to perform delicate movements of the controller.

After three months of owning the system it began to have problems. Game play would freeze, the system would not power on or would power on incompletely. The system behaved very erratically for about a month before completely failing to operate. Considering that they VTech V-Smile had never been dropped or otherwise mishandled by my child (a first!) it was obvious the system was defective.