Yoto Mini review: The Yoto Mini goes with us everywhere. Yoto Mini is a tiny, pocketable music player for kids and toddlers that shuns screens. While staying kid-friendly, it adds a surprising amount of tech for endless entertainment. As music lovers, we want our children to experience it as we did. But options are a bit limited.
You can go with a smart speaker, but that isn't easily controllable for little ones. You can go vintage with a cassette or CD player to stay more low-tech, but they're breakable and also not kid-friendly. The two common choices are music players designed for kids or parents just giving kids their phones. The Yoto Mini fits more into the former.
There's no touchscreen. No ads. No camera. No mic. Just a simple, small, music player designed for kids of all ages. The Yoto Mini is a tiny box, roughly two and a half by two and a half inches square. There's a speaker in the lower-left corner, a small pixelated screen, and two controls.
Users twist the large, easily grabbed knobs to control the playback. The left one adjusts the volume while the right navigates through the tracks. There's also a power button on the right side to turn it off. On the left, there is a 3.5mm headphone jack for connecting wired headphones.
It charges up over USB-C and a color-matched orange USB cable is included in the box. More on this in a few. The way it works is you insert one of the Yoto cards into the top slot. The box reads an NFC chip embedded in the card. Your Yoto Mini will then recognize the card and start downloading the playlist of tracks from the Yoto servers via Wi-Fi. The box has a total of 32GB of storage available on it.
Setup, as well as checking the status, is all done in the Yoto app. You'll want to have it because aside from adjusting settings, it also is home to plenty of free content. Yoto offers stories, songs, white noise, and more that you can play from the app to the player. There are also various timers, which is a nice touch.
These timers can be for homework for brushing teeth and play sounds, music, or stories for that duration. Outside of setup and free content, you can also see your library. It's broken down between your playlists, your purchased cards, sleep sounds, podcasts, and radio.
Podcasts are added via RSS feeds and there are almost two dozen radio stations that can be tuned into too. The Now Playing screen has music controls, volume, and a sleep timer. When you dig into settings, you'll be shocked at how much control you have over such a little player. Yoto has gotten very granular.
For example, you can set up completely separate day and night profiles for the player. You can choose when they go into effect, the display brightness, the volume limit, and even the button shortcuts. Advanced settings let you adjust the battery-saver timer, auto-off timer, Bluetooth pairing, headphone volume limit, and more.
Similar to how the popular Tonie box works via NFC and little hand-painted characters, the Yoto Mini works with NFC plastic cards. They're credit card-sized with fun artwork on the front and color-coded on the back based on if they're stories or music.
Every kid is going to be different. Whether they connect with stories or music and then the various genres within each of those. It's important for Yoto to have a fairly massive library for buyers to choose from. Without content, it makes it a lot harder to convince people to buy into the ecosystem.
Not only that, but the cards have to be a recurring source of revenue versus the one-time purchase of the boxes themselves. After several months with the Yoto Mini and multiple new card purchases, we're both impressed and underwhelmed at the same time.
Our test subject, Harrison, was much more interested in the music cards. While he loves reading books, he doesn't have the desire to sit through a book or story being read to him via a speaker. So most all the cards we listen to are the music ones and Yoto offers a diverse selection from Queen, to Sesame Street, to Disney.
There are also a lot of other cards, possibly produced by Yoto, that were just collections of songs, nursery rhymes, or covers of popular songs. The issue we ran into was there weren't many actual artists. You have Elton John Diamonds, Spice Girls' greatest hits, Queen Vol. 1, Beatles 1962-1966, and Beatles 1967-1970.
It would seem there are a lot of other widely popular musicians out there that would be perfect here. Even of the ones available, we wish that there was an option for a Queen Vol. 2 or a third Beatles card. Harrison's favorite cards have so far been the first volume of Beatles, the Queen card, and Elmo. Quite the selections!.
We're sure this catalog will grow and it has to be hard for Yoto to nail down licensing for bigger artists, but we're crossing all our fingers that they do. One of the things that drew us to the Yoto Mini was, on one hand, it's decidedly low-tech. Yet on the other, it was ripe for tinkering.
