Parents were left scrambling on Christmas day after the hot toy of the season appeared to crash and burn, in a perfect cautionary tale about the era of connected gadgets that can easily brick if their delicate infrastructure is put under strain.
The toy, called the Tin Can, is basically a stripped down landline phone that places calls over WiFi. The devices are styled after colorful tin cans — like an old school tin can telephone, an archaic toy so thoroughly ancient that kids today presumably have no idea it ever existed — with twirly cords just like the landlines of yore.
The pitch is that the Tin Can allows parents to set up a sort of closed network of other Tin Can users, making it a nice compromise for kids who are too young for a cell phone, but who still want to communicate with their friends and family members. It’s free to call other Tin Can users, or parents can pay a $10 monthly subscription to make outside calls.
Yet when kids rushed to phone their friends over the holidays to schedule playdates and sledding runs, they found the string had been cut.
“Call volume on Christmas Day increased more than 100x from the start of the month, which impacted people’s abilities to set up their devices or make calls,” Tin Can’s founder Chet Kittleson told Business Insider in an interview. “Despite spending months and months preparing for it, we didn’t get it all right.”
“It worked great, the kids were using it,” Maria Pahuja, a parent from Virginia, told the publication. “Then, Christmas morning, it stopped working. Sometimes you’d pick it up, and there would be a dial tone, you would call, and nothing would happen. Once in a while, a call would go through, and then two minutes later another call wouldn’t.”
In other words, kids probably would have had a better chance of connecting with their friends with an actual tin can telephone, operated via vibrationson a string, on Christmas morn’.
By now, things seem to be back up and running, though there are still some issues with call quality popping up, BI reports. A January 8th status update on the company’s website — and, tellingly, a banner on the very top of its home page — advises parents that “we’re continuing to see very positive signs of recovery, but we’re still working through some lingering issues.”
The company began in Seattle “with a handful of families and has since grown to serve families across more than 30 states,” its site says. BI reports the company has successfully raised $15.5 million since its launch in Autumn of 2024 — resources which apparently weren’t enough to prevent the toys from turning into a corded lump of coal at the exact moment they were supposed to make a great first impression.
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