I plan on getting my kids some kind of flip phone or dumb phone when they turn 10. Will try to hold off on smart phones until 8th grade.
The biggest problem right now has been the lack of a good mp3 player for the kids. Years ago we had the iPod. It was a perfect device. But Apple has discontinued that in favor of things that are basically iPhones.
There are a bunch of cheap Chinese-made mp3 players on Amazon, but they tend to have terrible navigation, sorting songs alphabetically, making it impossible to create playlists, inability to sort by genre, etc etc. I haven't found a good one (recommendations happily accepted).
So I gave the kids my old Android phone without a Sim card, and removed most of the apps, but of course they'll use the camera, and the browser... and I realized that this was just a slippery slope to that full-featured smart phone that I didn't want to get them yet.
The biggest problem right now has been the lack of a good mp3 player for the kids. Years ago we had the iPod. It was a perfect device. But Apple has discontinued that in favor of things that are basically iPhones.
There are a bunch of cheap Chinese-made mp3 players on Amazon, but they tend to have terrible navigation, sorting songs alphabetically, making it impossible to create playlists, inability to sort by genre, etc etc. I haven't found a good one (recommendations happily accepted).
So I gave the kids my old Android phone without a Sim card, and removed most of the apps, but of course they'll use the camera, and the browser... and I realized that this was just a slippery slope to that full-featured smart phone that I didn't want to get them yet.