Touch and pen input--while certainly nothing new--has enjoyed a resurgence in consumer awareness, particularly with the rise of gesture and stylus interface for all manner of electronic gadgets. Perhaps not too surprisingly, kids' toys are getting in on the action: Vtech's Kididoodle uses a stylus-touchpad input in combination with a simple LCD and buttons for the user interface of this interactive drawing toy. Sold as a pair for $30, the pads can operate alone for sketching and gaming or, with infrared (IR) beaming, become communicative devices.

The first thing I noticed in unboxing is that the two identical pads are tied electronically by a silver polymer thick film (PTF) flex umbilical in the package. The hard connection allows the product's demo mode to take place, synchronizing the sales pitch of the two pads without concern for proper IR line-of sight communication. The hard connection is pretty much automatically broken once the devices are removed from their cardboard-and-twist-tie box where the flex is pulled from a subtle slot in the side of the molded plastic case.

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It was amusing to note that while batteries are included (three AA cells per pad), several recommendations to replace the included demo AAs with "new alkaline batteries for maximum performance" are printed in the material. A peek under the battery cover shows the demo cells marked "Super Heavy Duty" despite their seemingly inferior status, a reminder that product hype and vacant marking/marketing terminology extends to even the most basic consumable.

Input comes primarily from a two-layer film touchpad implemented with carbon-silver film printing. Much like the transparent indium-tin-oxide (ITO) four-wire resistive touchscreen overlays used for phones, GPS and the like, the Kididoodle's touchpad replaces ITO with opaque carbon, still serving to provide a unique resistive bridge pattern for each touch point but at lower cost. Hard buttons integrated in the touchpad film join with other discrete buttons for mode select, entry confirmation, power on/off and sound volume. A button in the Kididoodle's stylus serves as a "record" switch when the stylus is applied to the touchpad, itself covered with a film overlay. This two-layer cover film provides (fluorescent orange) feedback of pen strokes and can be cleared by the slide of a bar to separate the films, much like the old erasable drawing tablets found in standalone form.

Drawn patterns, game images and received sketches are all displayed on a monochrome 42 x 38-pixel LCD. The display uses additional PTF flexes to attach the glass to the primary circuit board, here using heat-sealed adhesives to affect electrical connection, a technique common to calculators and other inexpensive consumer LCD-based products.