Toddlers: The New iPad Whizzes, Addicts

The iPad is becoming a major hit with toddlers—or at least with toddlers who have parents happy to plunk a $500 gadget in their hands. Parents say kids as young as 18 months are learning their way around the iPad's touchscreen with uncanny speed. And after putting the device down, they then try to treat TVs and standard computer monitors as if they were touchscreens as well, reports Ad Age, which handed the device to a 3-year-old, who took just a few minutes to learn how to swipe and access apps—and didn't want to give it back.

Media execs believe the junior iPad users could be mapping out the future of technology. "It really feels like a machine that is responding to their needs as opposed to something they have to work through," the director of-online ventures at PBS says. "A whole generation will grow up expecting that experience." Children's publishers and companies like Disney are keenly watching the trend and scrambling to create titles and apps for the iPad.
(More iPad stories.)