Tips for Programming Fisher-Price's Dora Knows Your Name Phone

So, your child is a huge Dora fan and you want to give her a big surprise. Fisher-Price's Dora Knows Your Name Phone presents a novel gift at a reasonable price. The Dora Knows Your Name Phone allows the user to program his or her child's name into the phone in Dora's voice, so it sounds like Dora is actually talking to the child. It's hard to put a price on having your child hear Dora say "Hola Sarah!," so the $15 suggested retail price seems very fair. The big question is - how easy is it to program your child's name into the phone?

The product box says that the Dora Knows Your Name Phone is easy to program, so one could assume that even the least tech-savvy user could quickly add his or her child's name to the phone with no problem. However, it took this writer (who is not a complete tech expert, but does have an engineering degree) over three hours to figure out how to program the Dora Knows Your Name Phone. It wasn't that the set-up was extremely complicated, but there are a few things that you should know before you get started.

First, and this may be straightforward to some but not to me, you need to take the Dora Knows Your Name Phone out of the box before you start programming it. I had hoped that I could program the phone while it was in the box so that I could give it as a present with the child's name already programmed into it, but there is a tab that needs to be removed from the phone before it can be used. The directions on the Dora Knows Your Name Phone box and website don't say that the phone has to be taken out of the box before programming, so I assumed that I could follow all of the programming steps without taking the phone out of the box. WRONG! Unfortunately, I didn't figure this out until three hours later, when I finally looked at the Dora Knows Your Name Phone detailed product instructions online (of course, these were included inside the box, but since I hadn't opened the box, I never saw them).

Other than this, programming the Dora Knows Your Name Phone is fairly straightforward. I did have some issues downloading the software, but that's because I had an older version of Adobe installed to my computer and had to install a newer version. A link to the newer version is provided on the Dora Knows Your Name Phone set-up website - note that if you have to do this, you should reboot after you install the newer version. Good luck as you begin your set-up of the Dora Knows Your Name Phone - your programming should go much better than mine if you don't make the same mistakes that I did!