It’s 5PM and I’m working on a headphones review. Just a few hundred more words before I can file the copy with my editors and go home. I need to concentrate, but I can’t. Why? My child just soiled himself.

Perhaps I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let’s take a couple of steps back. No, I don’t have a kid. The offspring in this story is a Tamagotchi , which, almost 20 years later, is enjoying a revival.

As a bona fide child of the 90’s, I’m no stranger to nostalgia, and when Bandai’s UK PR representative offered to send me a review unit for the revamped Tamagotchi, I jumped at the chance. I thought I’d play with it a bit, maybe write a review, but my wife had other ideas.

You see, we’re currently trying for a baby. While I’m looking forward to being a dad, the prospect of fatherhood (frankly) terrifies me in ways I never thought possible. I guess my fears boil down to two points: first, I won’t be able to lead the semi-carefree lifestyle I enjoy now.

Mostly though, it’s the responsibility of bringing a new human into the world and having to look after it as it’s most vulnerable. While I’d undoubtedly do my best, it’s a job I’m absolutely petrified of screwing up.

My wife thought that if I could handle the task of caring for an infant Tamagotchi during its most needy hours, I should be well-equipped to handle my own flesh and blood.

After all, like real babies, Tamagotchis need to be cared for. They require regular feeding, bathing, and entertaining, and like real babies, they won’t hesitate to let you know when you’re doing a deficient job.

How? The Tamagotchi emits an ear-piercingly shrill beep whenever it needs something, like food or attention. At first, this is all the time. Not unlike a real infant, the Tamagotchi has exactly zero consideration for your schedule or workload. “ Wipe my arse, dad. ”

My wife thought that this proposal could give me a taste of the real experience, but without the consequences and responsibilities. Perhaps she was right, and I decided to give her experiment an earnest attempt.

In retrospect, I chose an awful time to give this a try. The weeks leading to Christmas are unbearably stressful for those in the tech journalism business, as we wrap up loose ends before the new year, while simultaneously dealing with an influx of news and product launches.

If you’re fervently trying to concentrate, a needy digital infant is the last thing you want to deal with. I wasn’t prepared for the number of interruptions it generated.

After just five minutes, I could feel my patience wane. I wanted to shove it in a jiffy bag and return the binary brat to the PR agency. Priority shipping. Thanks, but also no thanks.

I did persevere further — but also not much further. After the working day was done, I handed the tiny beeping keychain to my wife and switched on the Xbox.

I failed. I’m a bad Tamagotchi dad. Suffice to say, my wife has custody now.

The concept behind my wife’s experiment isn’t that weird. For generations, people have prepared for parenthood by practicing with something else.

An entire generation of Americans learned the finer arts of child rearing by carting around eggs or animatronic dolls, or in the case of my colleague Georgina Ustik , a sack of flour.

You could also argue that this indoctrination happens at an even earlier age — at least for girls. As a child, I vaguely remember seeing adverts for Baby Born dolls. These mimicked much of the behavior of an infant child, particularly the crying, and required regular feeds and soothing.

But does this work? I looked after the Tamagotchi because I thought it was an interesting idea and I could get an article out of it. Was my heart truly in it? Not really.

But when it’s your own child — 50 percent you, 50 percent the person you love most in the world — I imagine it’s a little bit different, and in some weird way, you’ll learn to cherish those interruptions and late night diaper changes.

BlackBerry has killed its Classic smartphone permanently

It’s been a long, bumpy ride, but BlackBerry is killing its Classic smartphone.

The refreshingly solid Priv combined a large touchscreen with a slide-out keyboard, but the Classic maintained the traditional BlackBerry form of a small display with a physical keyboard directly below it, as well as an optical trackpad for scrolling through menus.

While it does have a touchscreen, the keyboard is your primary point of interaction. Basically, it’s the form factor BlackBerry fans have long known and loved.

BlackBerry’s blog post doesn’t specifically say that it will never try to make a Classic-style smartphone again, but it certainly reads like the company is ready to focus on newer form factors:

It’s written by the Ralph Pini, the company’s new head of devices , who joined the company in May to revamp its smartphone offerings for the modern world. Given the mention of the Classic’s predecessors, it looks like the BlackBerry is retiring the form factor as a whole, and not just the newer model.

In the meantime, BlackBerry says it will continue to actively support BlackBerry 10, and that it will continue to sell the Classic until it runs out. But it seems this is the final death knell for the BlackBerry of yore.

Sphero’s updated BB-8 can be controlled by a ‘force’-enabled wristband

CES Unveiled tonight had a lot of amazing products, but we were particularly drawn to a very familiar face – a robot that the entire world fell in love with over the past few months: BB-8 .

Sphero, the company behind the robot toy, showed off a new companion wristband today that will let players control the droid with gesture-based movements, or “using the force” as a Sphero representative called it.

The prototype we played with wasn’t quite complete, but it was fully controllable with simple force-esque movements such as pushing your wrist/hand forward to move BB-8 forward…

…and pulling your wrist back in order to make BB-8 retreat.

The adorable little robot also followed your hand as you move the wristband around his head.

The Force Band component will also be released alongside an updated look for BB-8, which features a grungier, dirtier-looking aesthetic – much like it looked in the movie after roaming the Jakku desert for Rey.

Sphero has yet to name a specific price – the company estimates the new version of BB-8 will go for around $150 but will not confirm whether this includes the gesture wristband. We’ll see the new, grungier, force-controlled BB-8 sometime in the fall of 2016.

Until then, smartphone-controlled BB-8 is still a lot of fun.