Hack all the things - Toniebox
17. Jun 2025
Continuing my Hack all the things series, I’m doing something slightly different today. So far I’ve hacked my PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS, but this time I want to talk about my Toniebox.
Or rather…my kids’ Toniebox.
If you’re unfamiliar with the thing, it’s a little music box with a built-in speaker, two little “ears” to raise or lower the volume and an NFC reader at the top. Instead of putting in cassettes or CDs (yes, I’m old!), you instead put little figurines (i.e. NFC tags) on top of the box. You can skim forwards and backwards by tilting the box (we never use that) and skip entire tracks by giving it a proper smack on the left or right.
These things come in multiple different colors.
Now, if you’re a bit familiar with NFC, you might be wondering where all the music is coming from. I don’t know how much information exactly an NFC tag can store, but it’s definitely way less than a 3h audio-play. And they are not using a crazy new compression algorithm either. They are using – drumroll – the cloud!
The ubiquitous cloud is also part of why I was against buying a Toniebox for the longest time. You need a Tonies account, otherwise the box is useless. The figurines are proprietary and cannot be used with any other hardware. As far as I know, there are no 3rd party “Tonies”.
The Toniebox needing an active internet connection also means that the company behind the Toniebox – Tonies SE – can theoretically track anything and everything my kids are doing with the box.
And of course it’s not a theory. Any interaction, putting on a figurine, slapping the box, using the ears, even playback progress, is recorded and sent out with a unique Toniebox ID – which of course is not anonymized and directly linked to your Tonies account.
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