Happy holidays from the T-Mobile gimmick team. The carrier has kept up a steady flow of silly, co-branded gimmicks over the past few years, most notably when it sent out rebranded bottles of 5G-themed gin.
The latest gimmick-joke-thing is a co-branded Lite Brite, the 1960s lightbox toy, which you can buy at t-mobile.com/5GLiteBrite for $20. That's not a premium: the Lite Brite Ultimate Classic is also $20 on Amazon. And T-Mobile's version has more pegs and the chance to win a trip.
The pitch, of course, is that T-Mobile now covers 200 million people with its mid-band 5G network. That has given the company the best overall 5G performance in the nation, and its first-ever win in our Fastest Mobile Networks tests.
Four out of we-don't-know-how-many boxes have a "Magenta ticket," which gives them two (unnamed) 5G smartphones, an (unspecified) HD TV, a year of Magenta Plus wireless service and a year of T-Mobile Home Internet service, along with a trip to an event at a T-Mobile venue in Las Vegas, Kansas City, or Seattle. This is absolutely the only prize pack I've seen offering a trip to Kansas City.
Turn on the Magic of Shining (5G) Light
So how is it? This is PCMag! I had to test it!
A Lite Brite is a simple gadget. It's a bunch of LED lamps in a box where the top is covered in black cloth. You poke clear plastic pins through the black cloth and they "glow." It was really cool 30+ years ago. It can be used flat on a table or stand up with an included kickstand.
The package comes with blue, green, white, orange, yellow, and magenta pins in a long Ziploc-type bag. There are 406 pegs total, far more than there are holes in the board, and there are more magenta pins (200) than any other color. The toy needs three AA batteries, not included. There are also some black paper templates for you to put over the board so you can create T-Mobile-themed designs. This model will work with existing Lite Brite Ultimate Classic templates, which you can find online.
I'm sorry to say the light is pretty uneven. There seem to be five light zones, and they aren't very bright and they don't overlap enough. I think you should totally hack it, get some strings of white LEDs from Amazon and add more LEDs. Otherwise the concept is sound.
For $20...it's a gimmick. But it's a funny gimmick? As a product reviewer, I wish the light was stronger and more even. This is not the gin, which was genuinely good gin. But if you're a T-Mobile fan, sure, go for it.