Child-friendly wearable smartphone gives parents a direct line to their kids

By Luke Dormehl January 4, 2018

myFirst Fone - Wearable Smartphone for Kids. With 3G Voice & Video Call, GPS and Care Call function

For parents of young kids, the decision to give them a smartphone can be a difficult one. One the one hand, the ability to give your child a way to contact you in an emergency, or vice versa, cannot be overstated in terms of importance. On the other, handing them a phone means potentially exposing them to unwanted communication — or simply carries the more mundane risk of being put down and lost.

A new Kickstarter campaign for the so-called “myFirst Fone” hopes to solve some of those issues. For starters, the 3G smartphone is worn like a watch, which should reduce the chance of it being misplaced. Despite this shift in form factor, it boasts a lot of the features you find on a regular phone — such as a pedometer and a 1.3-megapixel camera.

In terms of safety, the device lets parents plug in only certain numbers, so your kid will be able to receive only phone calls or text messages from numbers that have been pre-approved by you. It also lets you keep track of what your kid is up to. This can be done either through GPS or Wi-Fi-based tracking, or a feature which promises to alert you if your child leaves a geo-fenced area. Your child can additionally send an SOS message to his or her parents with a single button, while parents can listen in to what their kid is up to by accessing the device’s built-in microphone.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

MyFirst Fone certainly isn’t going to assuage the fears of all parents who are worried about gifting their kids a phone. It’s easy to imagine some parents strongly disapproving if the idea of giving their offspring a device which can be used for spying on them throughout the day — even if the spies are simply their well-meaning parents. However, if you’re looking for a straightforward way of keeping in touch with your young son or daughter, and don’t think a regular smartphone (or a more expensive call-making smartwatch like the Apple Watch Series 3) is the answer, this could be the gadget for you.

The device is currently available for pre-order on Kickstarter, with prices starting at $89. Shipping is set to take place in May.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributor

I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…

Mobile

T-Mobile wants to give you a free smartphone when you add a line

t mobile revvl news

Smartphones are wonderful things, but there is something that's even better than smartphones. What would that be? Free smartphones, of course. T-Mobile is offering free smartphones to customers when they purchase a new line in T-Mobile's Magenta tier or above. With a selection of five affordable smartphones on offer, T-Mobile is looking to capitalize on the back-to-school crowd.

Interested in grabbing yourself a free smartphone on your new T-Mobile line? All you need to do is add a line to your existing or new T-Mobile account, and select the $40 per month per line Magenta option. You'll be able to select from four currently available smartphones, or wait a short time for a fifth. You'll be able to choose from T-Mobile's own Revvlry and Revvl 2 Plus, the LG Q7 Plus, or the LG K30. Or, if you're happy to wait, you can instead select the new Samsung Galaxy A10e when it becomes available on July 26.

Mobile

Sony not giving up on smartphones, but will only focus on 4 regions

Sony Xperia 10 Plus

Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida has called its smartphone business “indispensable” amidst investor concerns over the loss-making side of the company, indicating Sony will continue making phones despite a push to close the side of the business down. However, in its recent corporate strategy meeting, Sony showed it will focus on only four markets internationally going forward.

Yoshida is quoted as saying smartphones are “a component necessary to make our hardware brand sustainable,” according to Reuters, and added that, “younger generations no longer watch TV. Their first touchpoint is [the] smartphone.” Sony considers the smartphone an entertainment device, which fits in with its PlayStation brand, televisions, and movie-making arm of the company.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.