iPhone Storybooks: Great for Toddlers and Parents

With all the reviews of iPhone games and apps one segment that seems to have gotten missed is iPhone storybooks. Yes, this is for the small market of parents with toddlers (like myself), but I find them great on two fronts. First, my five and three year olds really seem to like them. They are so easy to use that all I have to do is hand my iPhone to my three year old and he is more than capable of finding the app, launching it and listening to the story as he swipes through the pages. This can come in really handy whether in the car, restaurant or anytime he's about to throw a fit. I even hit a two week period where I gave him my iPhone at bedtime and after a few minutes went into his room, took it back and he went right to sleep. At this point I started referring to my iPhone as the magic rectangle. Second, I feel a lot less guilty if he's reading a storybook than if he's playing some game. Yes, they are not good at most games, but for some reason they still like them. My three year old has been hooked on Tap Tap Metallica for a week now. I feel a lot better when he plays an animal matching game or reads a storybook. If you aren't familair with storybooks here is the most recent one we've been reading (well its really more listening to) in our house.

ManualiPc's, Little Red Riding Hood, $0.99, is very similar to The Boy Who Cried Wolf which I reviewed a few weeks ago. That review includes a video of my three year old reading the story by himself if you are curious. The illustrations which according to the app store were made by a “contemporary cartoonist” are nice and caught the eye of both my 3 and 5 year olds. On the downside, I wouldn’t mind a few more pictures as there are only six. Nonetheless, overall this is one of the better storybooks I’ve found for the iPhone as it has an interactive drag feature for the illustrations that I haven’t seen in other apps. When you open the app you are taken to a screen with three options. Start Story, Options and Credits. Options include volume of story, volume of background noise in story and different ways to transition from one page to another. Personally, I like turning the background noise up to hear the chirping birds. Covering about the bottom quarter of each page is the text which you swipe to get to the additional text for each page. To get the narrator to read you press the sound icon in the upper right corner of each page. It would be nice to have an option to play the new text each time you swipe, but I believe the developers were wanting to encourage the kiddos to get used to swiping and tapping. They may do this a lot as one of the nicest features of the app is that most of the images on each page can be pressed and dragged. I hadn’t seen this with other storybooks and its a great feature. The story is the one everyone knows with illustrations of the wolf, Grandma and even the hunter. Overall this is a high quality storybook. Much better than most of the free ones you will find.