VTech V.Reader Interactive E-Reading System Interactive Printed Book

If you never read or believe another review, please believe this one. I purchased this v reader for my son because he loves to read. He has yet to read one book since he opened the toy. This was a waste of money. If you truly want an interactive reader save your money and purchase a cheaper tablet or the nook. Those products do the same thing and won't disappoint. Now, I have to go and replace his birthday present with another gift. What a waste of time and money.

I bought two of these , one for my 4 year old daughter and one for my 6 year old son. Overall they both love them and have actually learned a lot using the VReader. I do have a couple things that annoy me which is why I gave it 4 stars and not 5. This is extremely interactive ,having said that you now understand why batteries are drained rather quickly. If you buy this , don't even think about not getting the adapter or rechargeable batteries . The adapter outlet on the V Reader is sometimes flaky. I'm not sure if other parents have had this happen but it won't want to work and have to turn it or try unplugging and plugging back into the unit. This is annoying and it does it on both of the VReaders I have. This product has great games and offers a lot for eager to learn children. This has held up to a lot of dropping and being stepped on and still works . I would recommend rechargeable batteries strongly. Again, adapter is sometimes a pain and takes a couple minutes to get it working. It seems to respond much better to batteries.

We are on number 4 of these Vreaders. The first 2 after less than a day died because of some kind of flaw with the firmware. The next one the battery would not last for more than about a day, even good quality fresh batteries. Something about it not turning off fully. This last one lasted for a few weeks, and now asks us to recailbrate it. Their fixing program won't fix it. Sure you can always bring it back to the store, or send it in for replacement, but your child will cry like mine did when I took it away to fix.

If you want to play video on the v.reader, it will accept video in avi format with the MJPEG video coding and PCM audio coding. (I found a lot of codings that don't work such as MPEG, MPEG4 video and MP3 audio coding) I am posting this info because I spent a while searching for it at the vtech site and with google and finally had to figure it out the hard way. Additional details: Video: MJPEG (motion JPEG) 320x240 (will accept larger or smaller) framerate of 15 is good but not required Auto bitrate is fine Audio PCM (pulse code modulation) Mono (stereo is accepted, but I only see one speaker on the v.reader) 16 bit resolution 16kHz (didn't try higher sampling rates) To convert files, I used Pazera Free MP4 to AVI Converter version 1.6 I used the file manager in the learning lodge to move the videos to the v.reader. If the vtech file manager doesn't "see" the file, that is probably a good indication that the file will not play on the device even if you copied the file to the device with windows file explorer. To play videos that you loaded, go to the playroom, then pictures and find the icon at the bottom right that says "video player".

My son loves it and so do I. My only complaint is the fact we replace batteries like we change clothes. Other than that it keeps him busy in the car and we've already got new books for it. Its a great learning tool and good for children learning how to read