Tamagotchis are great, but caring for the classic virtual pet just requires quite a bit too much time and attention. What if you can have a virtual pet that thrives on just random fidgeting alone? That’s the idea behind the Hasbro Nano-Mals.
That’s right, Hasbro has announced a new virtual pet designed for kids ages five and up. Instead of being played like a pocket video game similar to the classic Tamagotchis, though, this one’s designed to serve as a fidget toy. No need to feed, groom, and play with your digital creature, as you can meet all its needs by simply fidgeting with various parts of its body throughout the day.
The Hasbro Nano-Mals are small pocket-sized toys measuring 2.7 inches tall, each one styled to look like some kind of cartoon creature. They have a couple of cows in there (Cowbert and Mootila), a pair of cats (Purrnelope and Pawtricia), a red panda (Pamanda), a narwhal (Blubby), and two unicorns (Stardream and Meadowmist). The one thing all of them have in common is that they’re painfully cute, making them a lot of fun to keep around as a virtual pet. One of the most notable things here is that there is no screen, which is quite refreshing for an electronic toy in this day and age.
Instead, it gets a large heart meter in the center of its torso, which lights up to let you know its particular needs at any moment. When it turns pink, it wants you to move its arms up and down, while blue means it wants you to press on its ears (which happen to be buttons). When it glows orange, you need to press the nose/mouth button, while purple means it wants you to move it around (it has motion sensors). The heart meter, by the way, shows three levels, so you know exactly when to keep fidgeting and when to stop.
The Hasbro Nano-Mals come with over 70 sounds and light effects, which it uses to keep its interactions varied each time out. There’s even prerecorded celebratory songs that play when you fill the heart meter. In case you’re fiddling with it in the library (can’t be noisy), you can opt to mute the toy by pressing on the nose button for two seconds. If you put two Nano-Mals together, they interact using lights, sound effects, and conversations using a made-up language called Nanish, which we imagine to be something that sounds equal parts cute and goofy.
The toy runs on a trio of LR44 coin batteries, although there’s no word on how soon you’ll need to replace them (hopefully, it takes a whole since it uses three of them). To maximize battery life, by the way, it automatically turns off after 60 seconds of inactivity, requiring you to do a quick press on the ears or the nose to switch it back on again. Each of the toys get detachable outfits that you can swap with each character and an attached keychain that lets you hang it off your backpack.
