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Barbie Girls MP3 Player
It's no secret that adolescent girls
know more about the internet than do many of their parents. Mattel
has gone above and beyond to create the perfect fusion of social
networking, 'tween pop culture and fashionable, cutting-edge
technology and to package it for adolescent girls: the Barbie Girls
mp3 player. It can change clothes like a doll, play music, and
connect its owner with friends via the internet.
Once an owner of a Barbie Girls mp3 player goes online, she can
navigate to BarbieGirls.com while the mp3 player is connected to the
computer. The site has existed for almost a year now with tangible
success in attracting a large following from its target audience.
Users can play games, talk and hang out on the web space. Girls can
choose to custom-design their online "avatars," or screen personas,
to match their own personalities. They have the abilities to design
their own virtual rooms and invite friends over, explore a virtual
online community and pay with "B bucks" to shop, even adopt pets
that have real-life counterparts available for purchase in stores.
As for the online chat community, it can be as safe as speaking with
a best friend in your living room if you want it to be. There is a
word filter program called "B Chat" that screens out personally
identifiable information and profanity from exchanges. There's even
a "Secret B Chat" feature that only allows girls who have met in
person and physically connected their mp3 player Barbie dolls to
each other to talk online. Girls only talk to other girls they know
in real life and not strangers with this enabled. Therefore, the
Barbie Girls mp3 player addresses parental fears about online web
rooms and creates a more secure chat network.
If your child is adept at understanding electronics, she may be able
to set up the Barbie Girls mp3 player and sync its accessories on
her own; setup requires anywhere from five to thirty minutes,
depending on your computer skills. The Barbie mp3 player has 512MB
of memory, which seems miniscule in comparison to most iPods, and
the sound quality is inferior to the aforementioned brand, but this
player is significantly less expensive. It can hold up to 120 songs,
the rough equivalent of eight hours of music. There is a separate
2GB memory card compatible with the Barbie Girls player for sale as
well to hold extra music; the Barbie Girls mp3 player has a miniSD
expansion card slot. The battery life on a charger should last for
ten hours. The software is
compatible with Windows XP and Vista but not Mac OS. That's the one
lame thing about this product; this isn't 1995, and it shouldn't be
that hard to come out with universally-compliant software. For now,
unfortunately, Apple users are out of luck.
There are accessory packs available for $10 each, with more clothes
to customize the Barbie doll player and decals to decorate the
headphones. At the time of the creation of this review, there were
three different style Barbie Girls mp3 player sets on the market,
and each model only had a few copies left at Amazon for sale. The
popularity of BarbieGirls.com has obviously been a huge success, and
it's a lot more fun for girls if their friends have an mp3 doll that
they can use to communicate with each other. This is definitely not
the item to wait to buy until December, because it WILL be sold out,
probably long before then. You can order one online right now if you
Click
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