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Exploding cars, boxing 'bots and a tiny tablet in Toy Fair video

You've got a friend in Luke Westaway, who shows you what's hot at this year's London Toy Fair in this video.

Katie Collins Senior European Correspondent
Katie a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET's European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET's Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a "living synth" by London's Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.
Katie Collins
2 min read
Watch this: London Toy Fair 2013

The path we technology journalists have chosen in this game of life dictates we spend much of time here at CNET focused on the serious business of helping you pick out your dream phone, but sometimes we must turn our attention to more trivial pursuits.

Toys these days are growing ever more sophisticated, utilising new technologies to delight and enchant in ways that would likely have made 7-year-old you wide-eyed with amazement.

To discover what's going to be hot this year in the world of toys, hit play on the video above. You've got a friend in Luke Westaway, your guide to the 2013 Toy Fair held at London's Olympia. Watch as he valiantly rides dinosaurs and -- somewhat less valiantly -- hides behind Power Rangers, to bring you all the latest in kiddy tech.

First up, Luke swings by old favourite Scalextric to check out at its latest racing circuit. Crashing tiny cars into one another has never been so much fun, as the latest vehicles explode into myriad parts whenever they cross paths. They also appear to be Lego compatible, allowing you to get creative with any spare bricks you might happen to have lying around as you reconstruct your racer.

If that's not quite violent enough for your tastes, the Tomy Battroborgs are Rock 'Em Sock 'Em-style robots, which you can engage in fisticuffs until one has manages to land five punches on another. The motion-controlled cyborgs sport LEDs, which flash when a rival has successfully landed a thump.

An abundance of cheap tablets aimed at children were on show at the fair, but the one that stood out was VTech's InnoTab 2S. The tablet is designed to take knocks and be pawed at with clumsy swipes, making it perfect if you want to keep your beloved child's sticky mitts off your iPad mini or Nexus 7. It sports a swivel camera on the top, as well as a stylus, and has its own app store from which children can dowload apps, ebooks and games.

What was the most technologically advanced toy you owned as a child? Reminisce in the comments below, or monkey-bar on over to our Facebook page.