Toyologist Review: My Puppy Pal Scout

£19.97 from Toys R Us

A line must be drawn. This far and no further. No more LeapFrog products in our house! It's time to pass some of them on to someone else. How about next door? Yes, their house seems a little lacking in LeapFrog products. Time for them to do some testing.

So they did.

The first thing to note about Scout (the green version - there's also one called Violet who's, well, you can probably guess) is that the nose is very good for chewing. Mmm... soggy nose. Lovely.

Beyond that, Scout can make a number of noises based on pressing his paws. You can change the noises by connecting it to your laptop and downloading the tune of your choice from the internet (yes, all LeapFrog products require the internet these days). I suspect a lot of people are just going to do this once to set it up and then never again.

Like almost every other LeapFrog product, you can personalise Scout to greet your child by name from a choice of...um...lots of names (you can choose a nickname - eg 'cheeky monkey' - if your child's name didn't make the list). You can also choose a favourite food, animal and colour.

The paws are very large and our cute little 1 year old reviewer had no problem getting all the noises to work. The toy is 90% soft and cuddly with the only 'hard' bit being the name collar which lights up a bit like ET.

Except it's blue, not red.

And the government aren't out to catch Scout.

And he can't magically make bicycles fly.

So there you go. Buy Scout if you like things which are a bit like ET, or green dogs which make entertaining sounds. Just don't put it in the washing machine if it starts getting a bit grubby - I'm almost certain that will result in disaster.