Etch-A-Sketch: The killer app for mobile?

Users will son be able to draw on their mobile phone screens using keypads. The drawings can be saved on the phone. To delete the drawings, users press '0 and the phone vibrates — mimicking the shaking motion on the old Etch-A-Sketch. The doodler is being introduced in the UK by mobile operator Orange.

For people of a certain age (ie, mine!) this is irresistible. The early 1970s were a golden period of innovation in children's toys. Previously, most kids were satisfied with simple toys; a hoop, say, or a top (basically a chunk of wood that spun around). However, the 1960s changed that. Kid's expectations were raised to new levels by a combination of burgeoning affluence and children's TV, and by the end of the decade, the 'bat-and-catty' just wasn't keeping the toy industry afloat anymore.

Kids were ready for something more exciting, but the technology wasn't — not quite yet. The electronic games industry had to wait to be born, until microprocessors became a mass-market product in the late 1970s. Until then, toy designers had to think up ways of making old technology do new, exciting things.

Enter the Etch-A-Sketch! This was a flat pad which you could draw on, guiding a stylus around a screen by twiddling two dials for 'up' and 'across'. Then, when you wanted to make a new drawing, you shook the whole thing and the old one disappeared. Trust me, this was enthralling stuff.

Alright, putting Etch-A-Sketch on a phone is a bit wacky, but then it's pretty wacky to expect people to buy a tinny 20-second clip of a song, and pay three times as much for it as they would for a hi-fi copy of the whole thing. But ringtones have turned out to be pretty popular. We like Orange's idea of mobile Etch-A-Sketch. The key, we think, is not to make it too slick: the clunkiness and lack of sophistication were an integral part of this toy's appeal.

Orange may turn out to have something here. If it does, the toys of the early 1970s provide a fertile field from which to reap further ideas for mobile games. A possibility we respectfully suggest is the Stylophone, a little electronic keyboard popularised by Rolf Harris and a young David Bowie (easy-to-lose pen interface essential). Another is the Spirograph, a fiendishly complicated pattern-drawing toy (and here, it would be important to enable you to make a slip after ten minutes of painstaking drawing, and ruin the whole thing).