By Richard Menta 2/13/06

Yes, it is cutesy this little portable digital music players from Tomy. It has to be as the target audience it aims for are those at the cusp of school age. Now your little tikes can listen to music like the big kids and feel all grown up and the like. Actually, I can see this tiny device becoming popular among early teenage girls, though even there I am not so sure as many teens are already waiting for their mobile phone contracts to expire so they can upgrade to a more feature-laden phone.

So what are the basics for Tomy Bear? It is a 128MB portable, quite modest in today's iPod nano times, but still enough to cause the hearing damage audiologists fear earphones are causing. The Tomy bear MP3 plays music in both MP3 and WMA, gets 8 hours to a battery, and weighs in at 1.8 oz. Dimensions are 3.7" x 2.5" x 1.6".