Gear Daddy reviews the iPod Touch, and demonstrates how to use the portable device as a family friendly portable media player. Download movies, educational apps, and video games for your kids. Troy reviews the parental controls that include internet protection, volume controls and feature controls, and highlights some of his favorite family friendly apps. Dadlabs ep 519 brought to you by BabyBjorn.

Ep 519 iPod Touch Portable Media Player


DADDY TROY Welcome back to gear daddy I’m Daddy Troy and today we are going to talk about the iPod Touch. It’s basically an iPhone without the phone and specifically we are going to talk about the educational value in owning one of these as a family.

DADDY TROY Today’s episode is brought to you by BabyBjorn, some of the best baby gear on the planet.

DADDY TROY You can think of the iPod Touch as a portable computer. It can do everything a computer does, it has a web browser, it has a calendar, it has email.

DADDY TROY The iPod Touch is great for families. If your on a plane this summer or taking off for a trip it plays movies. As you can see right here this is a movie we have loaded. This is the movie cars, and if your worried if your kid will watch a screen this size it has a really high pixel density a lot of brightness on it. If you have two kids you can get a splitter from a place like Radio Shack and split it out into two headphones.

DADDY TROY One of the great things about iPod Touch is that it has a lot of great parental controls. Number one you can totally lock your kids out of the iPod Touch if you want to. Number two you can give your password to get into it and have a different password to get into some of the other controls. For instance it has a volume inhibiter on it. You can set the max volume. It has some other parental controls on other features such as you can ask it not to play any songs with explicit lyrics, you can turn off the web browser. Since youtube is a separate program on the iPhone and the iPod Touch you can have it turn off youtube as well. You can turn off iTunes if you don’t want your kids listening to music or buying applications. Although your iTunes account is protected by your own password.

DADDY TROY Its called an iPod Touch for a reason, you manipulate the screen by actually touching it. It could be really good for a kids hand eye coordination. There’s a game on here that I loaded called Bubble Head. And I’m going to show you this game right now. He or she would actually have to use their fingers in order to play the game. Another game you can see that we loaded here is called Scoops. And the iPod Touch not only has a touch screen but it has an accelerometer. It knows when you tilt the screen back and forwards. Not only will you develop some finger coordination but some hand eye coordination.

DADDY TROY There are also some educational games you can download for the iPod Touch. Here are a few that I really love that my kids also dig. Here’s probably my favorite one of all time its called Star Walk and this is an application that you actually have to buy. A lot of the apps in for the iPhone and iPod Touch store are free. And this one right here actually requires something like four ninety-nine. And you’ll see the coolest thing about this is that it knows where you are, and it shows the stars where you are. You can actually tilt up and down and as you go down as a new constellation that comes into a view the actually creature that was assigned by human culture. That particular constellation starts to fade in and out. So if you for instance went to Cassiopeia you will see that constellation appear. Its really beautiful. This is one of the more sophisticated programs that my kids really love to use.


DADDY TROY Another application my kids like is this game called Math Zombie. This is for a kid who’s learning to add, and it requires you go through a bunch of numbers on the screen and figure out how they will add up to a certain sum. I know that parents will think this is something that think kids wont enjoy but a kid who is learning to add this very moment will dig a game like this. So here is Scrabble, my kid loves to play Scrabble we go back and forward and sometimes I help him spell words. You can see right here we were playing yesterday in the car while we were waiting for my daughter to get out of gymnastics. And he was really happy that he got a q and a u and he was able to spell quack.

DADDY TROY The iPod Touch is not only educational for kids but also for parents. Here we have the Dadlabs.com iPhone or iPod Touch application where we push videos to you about parenting. I don’t think this will excite your kids but you as parents will enjoy watching the videos.

DADDY TROY Today episode is brought to you by BabyBjorn and I say this will all sincerity my two favorite products are Apple products and BabyBjorn products, once you use them you know what good design is all about. If you have some iPod Touch or iPhone applications that your kids like let us know at dadlabs.com we have a discussion in the forum about iPod Touch and iPhone apps for kids. We’ll see you next time on Gear Daddy and all we long on dadlabs.com