Dance Code featuring Disney Princess

Not only is it a robot, but it's a pretty good one too -- Belle moves each arm independently to 4 different positions (by her side, in front, out to the side, and above her head) which makes a very convincing dance look. The core robot base is Belle's cone-shaped dress, and it hides two drive wheels, the one-off switch (easily accessible), and the lift switch (more on this below). Finally, Belle's upper body rises and falls slightly upon actuation. The result of all of this is that she really looks pretty great dancing, especially for this price. The voice and music is awfully good too and only has a small amount of voice clip reuse artifacting. The voice actress' tone is very princess-y and encouraging without being annoying. There are lots of little thoughtful nuances in the design, like Belle will comment on being picked up if the lift switch is released. My only complaint about the hardware is that the drive motors are awfully weak, so Belle will stop moving if the surface she is on is anything but extremely flat, and there's no indication what is wrong (would be extra cool if she said "oof!" or something when the drive motors became unable to turn). But really, this is a pretty awesome toy even without any smartphone integration at all since there are multiple play modes that don't require a smartphone (another great design choice by the designers). The Bluetooth connections work as well as I think is feasible to design at this point. With Android on a Galaxy S8+ and a Pixel 2, the app does a really good job at connecting to the doll when possible even when intended order if operations isn't followed. I've written mobile software that uses Bluetooth and it's just really, really hard to get it to work reliably on all devices, so I think the designers have done about as well as I think they reasonably could even though I'm sure some others do have Bluetooth connection problems. The app is pretty good. I think the kinds of things it can do are well-suited in complexity to the capabilities of a young child, and I can't think of any general activities I would have added. I still wish they had published the Bluetooth API for parents to play with, but I'm sure I'm in a small market in this respect :) My main complaint with the app is that the UI is too busy/not clean enough so it's harder than it should be to figure out what can and should be done. I'm usually in the other camp, but I think the app could have had a much more modern/minimalist aesthetic, and that would have made it much more usable for younger children. Overall, this is my favorite abstract-thought ("coding") toy I've experienced and my daughter is a big fan as well.