toys

TL;DR: Playmobil has a catalog of thousands of toys to inspire imagination and curiosity. Check out dinosaurs, cars, pop culture icons and more for your kids or the kid in you.

The holidays are officially upon us, so you’re probably scrambling online (or worse, looking for mall parking) trying to find the perfect present for someone. Thankfully, there’s this MrBeast + Mschf Everyone Gets a Car giveaway, where you’ll definitely get an ultra-cool collectible 1/64-scale toy Lambo — and even possibly win the real-life, full-size version for adults.

Which means you not only have the perfect gift for the car lover in your life, but potentially a brand-new ride for the new year. (Because you still need to treat yourself for the holidays, right?)

The internet is loaded with tips and accessories for people prone to losing their AirPods. This solution is far from portable and guaranteed not to fit your ear.

But the giant left-eared AirPod is Bluetooth compatible if you don’t mind holding it like, well, a hairdryer.

Lego is exploring the cutting edge of play with its Hidden Side sets. These include augmented reality (AR) ghosts that children catch on their iPhone or Android.

This upcoming offering from the toy giant is in line with all of AR, which combines the real world with the digital one. 

Toy-making giant Hasbro wants to bring its kiddy-friendly offerings into the twenty-first century with a nifty smartphone accessory, which would let people scan their favorite toys using their iPhone.

Unless their favorite toy happens to be an iPhone, that is. Hey, given Apple’s popularity among youngsters, stranger things have happened!

A Monument Valley fan has taken to the Lego Ideas website with plans to create real-life Lego models out of the award winning iOS game.

Lego Ideas user Isometry has created a page that you can log in and vote for if you want to support the project; it costs nothing but your time to do so.

And why wouldn’t you? This is a fantastic way to bring one of the best iOS games into the real world.

The editing on Star Wars: The Force Awakens isn’t finished yet but one of the characters already promises to be the hot toy of the Christmas season.

BB-8, the roly-poly little droid seen spinning across the screen in trailers for the highly anticipated movie, is now an app-controlled toy with an adaptive personality that responds to voice commands.

Everyone loves action figures, right?

With the rarer offerings regularly carrying price tags that put them out of reach for most allowances, however, they’re no longer exclusively for kids. With that in mind, here’s Cult of Mac’s list of the must-have figures with price tags to match. Featuring everything from pro wrestlers to sci-fi characters, we’re sure you’ll find something to tempt you.

Play nicely, now!

I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you don’t even like Batman. This beautiful, remote-controlled, iPhone-compatible Batmobile? It’s the toy that Gotham — hell, everybody! — deserves.

Kids everywhere are looking to Santa to bring them the hottest tech toys around, including iPhones, iPads, Nintendo 3DSes and Sony PlayStations, but these types of gifts can certainly strain a lowly elf’s meager paycheck.

If you’re looking for engaging and interesting gifts that won’t burst Santa’s money sack, take a look at the list we’ve put together for you below. It’s full of fun stuff that won’t leave you unable to afford a plate of cookies for that big red jolly fellow.

Love Lego? Love iOS? Prepare to get your chocolate in your peanut butter.

Lego has just started selling Lego Fusion, a series of toys that blend everyone’s favorite plastic bricks with iOS gaming.

By day, Robert Larner works for an investment firm. By night he directs Stormtroopers, Transformers and Daleks.

Using toys, camera tricks and a keen sense of story, the photographer delights Flickr and Instagram fans with movie stills. But the movies don’t exist.

The Scotsman grew up a discerning cineaste with a taste for the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and Ghostbusters movie franchises, but his greatest inspiration — in film and toys — was Star Wars.

“I could probably track my interest in toys via Star Wars,” Larner says. “When I was a kid in the early ’80s, I was completely swept up by the original Kenner 3.75-inch range. Then, in the ’90s, the remastered movies came out along with whispers of the prequels so the Star Wars toy range was reintroduced, so that caught my interest again. However, it was when Lego had the bright idea of making Star Wars Lego sets in 1999 that I really got sucked in and I haven’t looked back since!”

Eric is a Stormtrooper who escaped the exploding Death Star and wound up on Earth.

Now he wears jeans, enjoys lavender-scented bubble baths, drinks Johnnie Walker whisky and sings a song about his tomato allergy.

No longer a member of the Galactic Empire guard, Eric serves as muse to British photographer Darryll Jones, a self-described 39-year-old child who has turned his fondness for toys — especially Star Wars action figures — into a Force on Instagram.

“I have always loved toys,” said Jones, a food and lifestyle photographer who does work for the Tesco supermarket chain when he’s not taking pictures of toys. “I recall quite vividly setting up little dioramas in my room or in the garden and playing out the scenes in my mind, imagining that the little plastic figures could come alive.”

LEGO never goes out of style, and they’ve pretty much started to take over the world of new meda as well. Whether it’s through the LEGO movies or television shows, the 1940’s timeless toy has seen a rise in popularity with today’s youth. Now there are the games you can play where LEGO plays a central theme.

And Cult of Mac Deals has 5 LEGO titles packed into a single bundle – The LEGO Gamer Bundle For Mac – where you can get $110 worth of games for only $39.99!

LAS VEGAS — Remember Anki, the little iOS-powered toy car app that Apple brought up on stage for its World Wide Developers Conference last year?

We got to catch up with them at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show to talk about the app, the AI-controlled toy cars, and how they’ve created the latest must-have toy gadget with Apple’s help.

LAS VEGAS — Maybe tech journalists are prone to ADHD, and simply attracted to things that flit about. Or maybe the rest of the gadgets strewn about the room at CES Unveiled, the press-only event that customarily kicks off CES for journalists, just weren’t all that zingy this year. Or maybe Parrot‘s Lilliputian drone really is that cool.

Whatever the reason, Parrot’s new MiniDrone — a miniaturized version of their AR Drone with no camera but detachable wheels that let it roll about on the ground or “climb” a wall — drew throngs of tech bloggers and had camera crews lined up to film.

Is nothing sacred? I had thought that paper airplanes might be the last holdout for fully-analog toys. After all, all you need is a sheet of paper, a pair of functioning hands and a place to throw stuff. Even in jail these things can be found, and while your first attempts might not fly so well, the joy of the game is in the tuning and improving of your designs.

But now even that simple pleasure has been ruined by technology: the PowerUp 3.0 iPhone-Controlled Paper Airplane is a thing which will soon be available.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Back when I was a kid, I had all kinds of Fisher-Price toys I loved playing with. But I don’t think I remember anything quite as magic as Fisher-Price’s new line of Apptivity sets for preschoolers that combine child-safe cases and toy figures with slick augmented-reality apps (though my little Classic Xylophone came close).

I’ve seen the iPad morph into a lot of things, but the press release for this little trick definitely slackened my jaw: It’s an appcessory that turns the iPad into a miniature foosball table.

When the folks at Griffin were choosing a mythical creature for which to name their company¹, they might have gone with Janus instead, to better reflect the schizophrenic nature of its offering: serious computer accessories vs. frivolous toys.

That’s not to say that the toys are bad. On the contrary, Griffin’s iOS-controlled choppers look amazing. And now they’re joined by these remote-controlled monster trucks.

I’ve waited over two decades to own a real robot. It was one of those silly childhood dreams to own something straight out of Terminator that obeys commands, spies on people, and rains down havoc if need be. Even though we’re in the year 2012, we still haven’t managed to create affordable robots, which is a pretty big letdown if you ask me. Thankfully, we’re getting closer, and playing with the new Parrot AR. Drone 2.0 has given me hope that the toys of the future are going to kick some major ass.

World World Robots is a great series by artist Ashley Wood Three A that describe a grungy apocalyptic world in which gas-masked humans are openly at war with various cool looking models of murderous rogue robots, spanning the surface of the earth, the moon and even mars.

There’s an accompanying toy line by Three A, and one of their latest models is this awesome robot inspired by our favorite company. Bearing the designation STEVE-J, the Caesar APP-EL comes with a rainbow shield after the style of the vintage Apple icon, his own miniature iPad and some vintage iPod styling. It even comes in an Apple-inspired box.

Source: The Fwoosh
Via: Reddit

Remember the MagnaDoodle? If you fall on my side of the Great Age Divide, then your answer will be an excited “yes!” The re-usable screen of the Magna Doodle was just about the closest thing that us 70s-born youngsters had to the touch-screen iPhone which you ungrateful kids enjoy today.

If you’re on the wrong side of the Great Age Divide, your answer will be all like “WTF old man you suck LOL.” To which I would respond with the following punishment: You will be forced to use this Magna Doodle for a week. Without the iPhone inside.

Three words: Angry. Birds. Helicopter. What more do you need to know before you peel a crisp $50 off your money roll and place your order?