(Pictured right: the popular Tamagotchi Connexion Version 2 model for girls)

As mentioned on the first page, make sure you buy a Version 4 or Version 3 Tamagotchi if at all possible. There are more characters, more (and better) games and a shopping facility that now includes items 'revealed' after entry of passwords found on the official Tamagotchi web site. In the shop you can buy things and give them to your Tamagotchi to eat or to play with. Or even give them to another, connected Tamagotchi, via infrared. There's even a gift wrapping option!

The whole premise of a Tamagotchi is that it's an electronic pet, a very demanding one, so your child will keep fiddling with it, to keep it healthy and well fed. Be warned that schools usually ban them, so you'll have to wrest the unit from your child each morning (reassure them that the 'pause' control [new to Version 2 units onwards] will mean that nothing will happen to their pet while they're at school).

The ideal time to give your child the Tamagotchi is therefore the start of a school holiday, so that they can get the worst of the addiction out of their system in one continuous block of days.

Assuming that you set the clock correctly when first turning the Tamagotchi on, it will go to sleep (ZZzzz.......) at roughly 8pm and wake up sometime after 8am, and inbetween it will do nothing at all. So don't be worried about your child staying up fiddling, their new toy automatically shuts itself down when they're supposed to be asleep.

Note that if the novelty of the Tamagotchi wears off quickly (some children lose interest), they're quite saleable on the second hand market (e.g. eBay).

The batteries in a Tamagotchi do wear down, but they last for 4 months or so and when they finally do go, there's enough information stored in 'flash' memory to let you 'DOWNLOAD' and restore the character's life more or less as it was before the battery change.