It’s almost difficult to believe that Tamagotchi is 25 years old now, but that’s exactly the franchise to celebrate this year. Apart from all the technological advancements, especially in toys, the bandai brand owner still believes in the joy of a simple egg-shaped device that holds virtual pets. That said, there is always room for improvement and what seems like what is tried to be presented by Tamagotchi Smart, placing the same pet maintenance experience in the form of a smartwatch, complete with touch and raw sound input.
To be clear, Tamagotchi Smart is not a smartwatch with the Tamagotchi application installed. It’s more like Tamagotchi that you can wear on your wrist and have hours functionality. With its size and function, it is clearly aimed at demographics that do not need special watches, especially smart watches, like children.
Tamagotchi Smart does bring some of the similarity of smartwatch to toys. It has a touch input to wake your pet and interact with it. It also has sound detection but is not recognized. In other words, it can be used to wake pets too but not much more. It is possible to listen to music, but the product page does not really explain how to do it.
The device does have one unique feature in the form of a tamasmart card that can be connected to Smart Tamagotchi. The cards will have new content for pets, almost like DLC, but will be tied to most of the three Tamagotchi smart devices ever used. Reading the FAQ, “SmartWatch” actually has a very limited guarantee, including no water resistance, a rather strange decision for devices intended to be used by children.
The Tamagotchi SMART was launched on November 23 but fans of a hard-die can try their luck to get one earlier in the lottery from June 17 to July 2. The smartwatch itself will cost 7.480 JPY, around $ 68, while the Tamasmart card will go for 1,100 or $ 10. Global availability is still unknown at this time.
