If you think Tamagotchi is past tense for virtual pet, think again. They’re connecting with some US partners to create a competitor to Disney Mobile and Firefly.

“Tamagotchi virtual pet now comes as just one of the many features loaded onto a fully functional prepaid mobile phone for kids. The phone is being brought to retail through a joint effort between PlayPhone and Bandai America Inc.”

Summary:

• It’s aimed at kids, duh
• The handset is brightly colored and comes with a preloaded Tamagotchi mobile game and a custom Tamagotchi wallpaper
• It’s a no-contract, pay-as-you-go handset
• It comes with parental controls that parents will be able to limit dialing access for incoming and outgoing calls and lock the push-to-talk and Web access capabilities.
• Ability to convert users’ prepaid airtime minutes into mobile content credits to spend on additional wallpapers, games, and Ringtones on the TamaPhone.com Website – thus avoiding the use of a credit card.

Read more information at: http://www.collectiondx.com/node/147

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This is a real text message from Cingular. (I’m sure my phone is in their database from last season when my daughters voted for Ms. McPhee.)

But, I couldn’t believe this jumble of text. I have no doubt 16 year olds could probably understand it… but I question whether that still makes it smart marketing. Does bad language and incoherent punctuation add street cred? Do they do it because they believe users won’t scroll?

The haphazard punctuation — sometimes a comma, sometimes a period, sometimes nothing — is the icing on the cupcake. Why push the boundaries of language this far into the downright ludicrous? Are they trying to cut character count to save on data transfers? I don’t get it.

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