Mobile SNS for Kid-Ups

Last night, while driving home, I heard a radio spot for the now infamous Tamagotchi product line. I guess I had secretly been hoping that the name would never re-surface, but it seems "They're Baaack"!

The new product is called Tamagotchi Connections. The name intrigued me almost immediately. It seems the new version have all the same annoying, addictive traits of the earlier generation, but one unique new angle has been added: social networking.

As the ad promised "Play Games, Make Friends, Find Romance". It seems that the new generation is able to connect using some form of wireless/radio technology which allows the devices to pair, to borrow from the Bluetooth dictionary. The notion of interacting via mobile devices is certainly not new. What's fascinating is that this is indeed a toy, an obsessive trendy kind of toy which makes it quite possible that there will be tons of them in the while in short order.

Something else crossed my mind as I considered this new device. The Tamagotchi requires care, nurturing, grooming, and interaction. It's almost paralleled to the way the Pure-Model SNS works now. If you ignore it, it dies on you. Is Bandai creating a Purpose-Model SNS (even though the purpose is pretty flimsy)?