26
Only 3% of UK 12-year-olds don’t have a smartphone. Here is how four of them feel about it
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
26 points (90.6% liked)
United Kingdom
4091 readers
115 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in [email protected] or [email protected]
More serious politics should go in [email protected].
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly a big part of this is that the "dumb" phones are just as, if not more, expensive than a used or low end smartphone.
My daughter did use a dumb phone for a while, but then they started shutting down 2G and some 3G masts in the area and it was causing problems. There are some newer dumb phones that can use 4G, but given the prices and half of them still using micro usb for some damn reason (I'm a big fan of just carrying around one charger) it made more sense for me to give her an old smartphone and lock it down a little.
Is there some kind of parental software that can lock down phones like what happens on corporate phones? Like where you can control which apps are installed etc? That sounds like the best approach: just give them a phone with WhatsApp, phone and SMS. Any refurbished phone from the last 10 years would work for that (lack of Android security updates might be an issue though)
Family Link works okay for Android... It is google first party. Wish I could find something that worked for multiple platforms in the same app, but also that would probably be its own nightmare.
Apple Watch is a good solution. Can be locked down as much as you want
Yeah, a cheap smart phone is like £70. That's pretty cheap to have a GPS tracker and way to contact them wherever they are.
Most of the more worrying aspects can be locked down, but I suspect most parents wouldn't know how to do that.
Off topic, but I bought a handful of magnetic cables and a few different ends to match our devices, and now one cable works for charging everything.
It has the downside of not letting you connect the device to a computer, but because they're magnetic, they're breakaway cables. My kid has walked away with their tablet after forgetting to unplug it, and nothing bad happens 👍
Careful with those, almost started a house fire once because the connection wasn't as tight as it needed to be. With it being magnetic and carrying power you run into the risk of metal debris magnetising itself on it and completing a circuit
I've looked into getting these magnetic connectors for some of my devices but I've seen to many horror stories online about electrical damage caused by these cables. Seems worth it just to stick to plain connectors.
Or just non fast wireless chargers
I'll keep an eye on them, thanks for the heads up 👍