The Wirecutter Show Episode 4: Is It Time to Get Your Kid a Phone?


ELLEN: Yeah. So, we’ve tested both smartphones for kids and also what we keep calling dumb phones or flip phones. We’ve tested both of them. The smartphones-for-kids market has really started to grow. And when we first started, there was only one. So the ones we recommend right now are currently the Bark Phone and the Pinwheel phone. They are basically all Android phones that have been modified with their technology to be able to create it and make it a kid’s phone. So that means there are a lot of restrictions on it. The nice thing about the Bark Phone is that you can kind of grow with it. So if you want to start out and only let your kid call and text, they basically get a smartphone. They can do things like take pictures or record video. You pay a little bit extra, but you can also send group text, and you can send photos and multimedia through the phone. You can do a lot of the things that people want to do on a smartphone. And then as your kid gets older, you can pay more. It’s a monthly subscription, and as they get older, you can allow them to have the apps that you approve, even Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat, with some degree of monitoring. I always say “some monitoring” because I feel like people think, “Oh, if I get this phone, it’s going to keep my kids safe.” But it only keeps your kids safe to a certain degree, or it will alert you to, say, if someone sends a questionable message to your child, or if someone sends nudes to your child, or if your child sends nudes to someone else, it might catch that. It doesn’t catch everything, but it does catch a lot. Sometimes it catches too much. I think there was one example where, like, a kid was talking about getting, like, Tylenol and drugs, and that was flagged to the parent, right?



Source link

Previous articleAcer launches the first Swift laptops with Lunar Lake CPUs