Yoto Mini is a tiny, pocketable music player for kids and toddlers that shuns screens. While staying kid-friendly, it adds a surprising amount of tech for endless entertainment.
As music lovers, we want our children to experience it as we did. But options are a bit limited.
You can go with a smart speaker, but that isn’t easily controllable for little ones. You can go vintage with a cassette or CD player to stay more low-tech, but they’re breakable and also not kid-friendly.
The two common choices are music players designed for kids or parents just giving kids their phones. The Yoto Mini fits more into the former.
There’s no touchscreen. No ads. No camera. No mic. Just a simple, small, music player designed for kids of all ages.
Yoto Mini review: Music player design
The Yoto Mini is a tiny box, roughly two and a half by two and a half inches square. There’s a speaker in the lower-left corner, a small pixelated screen, and two controls.
Users twist the large, easily grabbed knobs to control the playback. The left one adjusts the volume while the right navigates through the tracks.
There’s also a power button on the right side to turn it off. On the left, there is a 3.5mm headphone jack for connecting wired headphones.
It charges up over USB-C and a color-matched orange USB cable is included in the box. More on this in a few.
Yoto Mini review: The Yoto Mini is very durable, even with grubby kiddo hands
The way it works is you insert one of the Yoto cards into the top slot. The box reads an NFC chip embedded in the card.
Your Yoto Mini will then recognize the card and start downloading the playlist of tracks from the Yoto servers via Wi-Fi. The box has a total of 32GB of storage available on it.
Yoto Mini review: App control and settings
Setup, as well as checking the status, is all done in the Yoto app. You’ll want to have it because aside from adjusting settings, it also is home to plenty of free content.
Yoto Mini review: Playing Queen on the Yoto Mini, adding various content and timers to our library, and our library of Yoto cards
Yoto offers stories, songs, white noise, and more that you can play from the app to the player. There are also various timers, which is a nice touch.
These timers can be for homework for brushing teeth and play sounds, music, or stories for that duration.
Yoto Mini review: There are a lot of settings to tinker with in the Yoto app
Outside of setup and free content, you can also see your library. It’s broken down between your playlists, your purchased cards, sleep sounds, podcasts, and radio.
Podcasts are added via RSS feeds and there are almost two dozen radio stations that can be tuned into too. The Now Playing screen has music controls, volume, and a sleep timer.
When you dig into settings, you’ll be shocked at how much control you have over such a little player. Yoto has gotten very granular.
For example, you can set up completely separate day and night profiles for the player. You can choose when they go into effect, the display brightness, the volume limit, and even the button shortcuts.
Advanced settings let you adjust the battery-saver timer, auto-off timer, Bluetooth pairing, headphone volume limit, and more.
Yoto Mini review: Playing music and stories
Similar to how the popular Tonie box works via NFC and little hand-painted characters, the Yoto Mini works with NFC plastic cards. They’re credit card-sized with fun artwork on the front and color-coded on the back based on if they’re stories or music.
Every kid is going to be different. Whether they connect with stories or music and then the various genres within each of those.
It’s important for Yoto to have a fairly massive library for buyers to choose from. Without content, it makes it a lot harder to convince people to buy into the ecosystem.
Not only that, but the cards have to be a recurring source of revenue versus the one-time purchase of the boxes themselves.
After several months with the Yoto Mini and multiple new card purchases, we’re both impressed and underwhelmed at the same time.
Our test subject, Harrison, was much more interested in the music cards. While he loves reading books, he doesn’t have the desire to sit through a book or story being read to him via a speaker.
Yoto Mini review: Just some of the Yoto cards we have on hand
So most all the cards we listen to are the music ones and Yoto offers a diverse selection from Queen, to Sesame Street, to Disney.
There are also a lot of other cards, possibly produced by Yoto, that were just collections of songs, nursery rhymes, or covers of popular songs.
The issue we ran into was there weren’t many actual artists. You have Elton John Diamonds, Spice Girls’ greatest hits, Queen Vol. 1, Beatles 1962-1966, and Beatles 1967-1970.
It would seem there are a lot of other widely popular musicians out there that would be perfect here. Even of the ones available, we wish that there was an option for a Queen Vol. 2 or a third Beatles card.
Harrison’s favorite cards have so far been the first volume of Beatles, the Queen card, and Elmo. Quite the selections!
We’re sure this catalog will grow and it has to be hard for Yoto to nail down licensing for bigger artists, but we’re crossing all our fingers that they do.
Yoto Mini review: Tinker, tinker, tinker…
One of the things that drew us to the Yoto Mini was, on one hand, it’s decidedly low-tech. Yet on the other, it was ripe for tinkering.
It’s a Bluetooth speaker with an NFC reader that can download tracks from the internet. We had to see what we could do with it.
Yoto Mini review: We created playlists for Elvis songs and our own cards
Yoto does offer blank cards where you can create your own. This is a great starting point.
We took some of our own music, like a bunch of Elvis songs, and created a playlist with them through the app. We saved the songs on our Mac into iCloud, then opened them from the Files app via the Yoto app.
Just like that, we had a custom card with our own music on it. To go further, we found out you could create your own graphics for the tracks.
Yoto Mini review: We used Yotoicons to create graphics for our playlists
We played around making some low-res artwork in Affinity Photo, which worked well enough. Not long after, we ended up stumbling on a whole website dedicated to already-created Yoto icons.
This made our card look even better when Harrison played it. But we were sure we could do more…
Buying the blank cards from Yoto was $14.99 for a five-pack. Since they just seemed to be NFC cards, we wondered what would prevent us from buying generic blank NFC cards and programming them ourselves.
After a bit of research, we found some compatible cards on Amazon that we snatched up for $8.99. And that was for a 10-pack — less than a dollar per card.
They weren’t as easy as we hoped to create, but using NFC Tools and some Google knowledge, we got there. We created additional blank cards with us talking, more songs, and anything else we wanted.
In reality, this was way too much work. It’s not feasible for your average person to do this, but for a techy bunch like us, it was just a fun experiment to see if we could, not necessarily that we should.
Still, if you want to experiment with yourself or even something to try with your older kid, it may be worth learning some new skills.
Yoto Mini review: Durability and playtime
We can wholeheartedly confirm that our tester has put the Yoto Mini through its paces. It has been tossed, dragged, kicked, and dropped.
Repeatedly.
It has largely faired extremely well. There are two failure points that we’ve isolated though in our testing.
Yoto Mini review: The USB port is one of the few points of failure for this box
First is the USB-C port. Having an exposed port on a child’s toy should be a no-no.
Dirt, dust, debris, food, and who knows what else can easily get on this port as children aren’t particularly known for their cleanliness. Shockingly, Harrison did not damage the port.
It ended up breaking on its own after a couple of months of use just when being plugged in. We could see with a flashlight that the pins on the inside of the port had gotten bent and when plugging it in to charge, it pushed them back more until it no longer drew power.
For the next iteration of the Yoto box, we implore them to go with something like Qi2 on the bottom. According to our power meter, the Yoto Mini only draws 5W of power so Qi2 would easily be enough.
Plus, the magnetic alignment would make it more kid-friendly. And of course, you’d have one less point of failure.
Yoto did replace the box under warranty and we’ve had no issues with the second one.
Yoto Mini review: The edges of the cards have started to peel up after lots of use
The second issue we saw was with the cards themselves. They are plastic cards with the artwork on the front and colors on the back.
They aren’t printed directly onto the card, but are some sort of matte lamination. After copious use, the artwork is starting to peel off the cards for us.
Maybe this is just superficial and obviously wouldn’t impact playback at all, but if they all peel off, we’ll have to start labeling the blank cards with Sharpie.
Yoto Mini review: Big versus small
Aside from the Yoto Mini, there is also a full-sized Yoto player. Besides just being bigger, it has a few other benefits to it.
The larger size allows for louder, stereo sound versus mono. It can also be used as a nightlight with a soft glow around the screen when tilted.
Yoto Mini review: The full size Yoto box
It has longer battery life, up to 24 hours, and even supports wireless charging. As an extra touch, it can monitor room temperature, which some parents may like to use.
In our testing, the larger model just felt awkward. Perhaps it’s better suited for even older children, but Harrison was never drawn to it like the mini.
It’s hard to carry around and is much better placed in a fixed position. It would be perfectly at home on a nightstand or bookshelf.
For older kids who want a nightstand speaker that they can use as Bluetooth output, a nightlight, and a way to listen to stories, the big one does great.
Yoto Mini review: The small and full size Yoto players
But for any kid who wants to run around with it, take it with them, play outside with it, or otherwise just not leave it in their bedroom, the Yoto Mini wins out. Plus, it’s cheaper.
Yoto Mini review: Should you buy the Yoto Mini?
Yes. The answer to the question “should I buy the Yoto Mini?” is an emphatic “yes.”
It has been the single most-used item that Harrison has owned. We’re aware that it won’t resonate with every child the same way, but it’s got a wide enough appeal that there’s a good chance they’ll like either.
Maybe it’s a good way to record yourself reading stories for when you’re out of town or maybe it’s a way for your kiddo to wind down at the end of the day, or maybe something to keep them busy in the car.
There are a lot of uses for it, as well as a ton of content. All the purchasable cards, the “create your own” cards, or the free content on the app.
We’ve started getting into the little “Yoto Daily” broadcast too that plays when you turn it on without a card.
Yoto Mini review: The Yoto Mini is fun, versatile, and screen-free
Wireless charging would make this better, but that’s not a strong enough reason to put off buying one. Maybe just a chance to upgrade should a new model ever launch.
In a world where a lot of time is spent watching habit-forming television, this little box has brought so much joy. It’s durable, fun, and can be educational to boot.
Yoto Mini review: Pros
- Lengthy, 14-hour battery life
- Can be used as Bluetooth speaker
- Durable and easy to use for toddlers
- Expansive catalog of music, stories, & licensed content
- Cheaper and more portable than larger model
- Fun to tinker with when making your own cards
Yoto Mini review: Cons
- Even more licensed music should be added
- USB-C port can be damaged
Yoto Mini review: 4.5 out of 5
Where to buy Yoto Mini
You can find the Yoto Mini on Amazon for $62.99, as well as various other accessories like lanyards, headphones, and silicone covers.