The latest incarnation of Elmo is now meant to not just laugh but to teach your kids things. Love to Learn Elmo comes with sensors in the nose, stomach, and hands that can be used to interact. Of course you can tickle his stomach to make him laugh. You can have Elmo tap his stomachs to make music or clap his hands together to help you go through letters and numbers. 

Love to Learn Elmo has a free app that a parent can put on their tablet. The app allows parents to customize Elmo with your child's name as well as your child's favorite animals, colors, and foods. Elmo will talk about those items with your child.  You can help customize learning by setting Elmo to talk about subjects such as letters, numbers, colors, and a few more. 

One of the great things for parents is that you can use the app to have Elmo say certain phrases to your child. For instance you can tap a button on the app and Elmo will say "Do you need to use the potty?" and then have Elmo congratulate the child for using the potty. There are many helpers on the app on subjects like cleaning, manners, eating, and more. 

It also has games for your kid in the app. They can play along with Elmo beside them to find things or help other Sesame Street characters perform various tasks. 

While I think this toy is great for parents with younger kids there are some drawbacks. The primary one is the additional technology you need to make this toy run. Requiring a modern smartphone/tablet may be easy for some people but having to deal with application/operating system incompatibility is worrisome for a toy like this. It also communicates over Bluetooth which is another technical barrier for people to overcome. From what I was reading from other parents, they said to do the setup with your child as it will interact with your child as you configure it through the application (e.g. introducing itself to the child by name). 

What really blew me away though is that this toy is fairly affordable. It sits around the $60-$80 mark with most retailers which is a steal for its capabilities in my opinion.

Add Elmo to your holiday wishlist now!