The Yoto Mini Player Will Save Your Sanity When Traveling with Kids (& It's on Sale for Black Friday)

The Yoto Mini is the pocket-sized version of the Yoto, an audio player that lets you pop in cards and play music or listen to stories for up to 14 hours per charge. While it doesn’t have the wireless charging capabilities, room thermometer or night light that the larger model has, it makes up for it in portability, clocking in at less than 3 inches by 3 inches in size. (It’s also considerably cheaper, costing $70—or, during the Black Friday sale, $55—to the full-size Yoto’s $99.)

What Age Is the Yoto Mini Best for?

It’s advertised for ages three to 12, though kids four to eight seem to enjoy it the most. The controls are simple—just an on/off button and two knobs to control the volume and play, pause and skip tracks, making it fairly intuitive for little ones to figure out. 

Audiobook cards are sold separately, and when you get one, you’ll need a wifi connection to download the content. Once it’s downloaded, you can pop in a card at any time, and the Yoto Mini will recognize it and start playing the story or playlist.

Each Yoto Mini can hold roughly 350 hours’ worth of content in its 16 GB of storage, so you can collect a ton of cards and still have room to spare. (The brand notes that if you do fill it up, new cards will replace content you haven’t used in a while, but that content will still exist in your library and be available to listen to whenever you have wifi connection.) Despite having more than a dozen cards, we haven’t come close to reaching capacity yet.

The Pros:

• It’s compact. Going anywhere with a kid involves packing too much stuff, so something that fits in your pocket is a huge plus. Add to that the fact that all of the cards could fit in a binder with card protectors—making them easy to organize and tote—and it easily won me over when compared to other audio players that use figurines to play stories. (While cute, keeping track of the figurine styles—and ensuring they don’t get lost amid Happy Meal toys and Barbie detritus—can be a pain.)
• The cards are durable. They’re about as thick as a credit card, so they don’t break easily.
• You can record your own stories too. The Mini comes with a Make Your Own card, which lets you add whatever you’d like to them, like the modern-day mixtape. (It can be cool to send ones to far-flung family members and have them record a story, then surprise your kids at bedtime with a love note from miles away.)
• The Yoto Mini is reliable. Tablets and other tech have been glitch-prone, but the Yoto Mini seems to download content easily and work consistently. It’s gotten us through multi-hour road trips with ease.
• New stories are released every month. There’s no shortage of options, whether your kid’s into Disney tales, the Splat the Cat series or even Bob Marley poems.

If you travel frequently, yes. There are so many audiobooks to choose from, as well as a free daily podcast you can listen to, and the price is reasonable, compared to other tech for kids.