You may remember the Cingular commercial with the child professing the need to text her "BFF Jill" 50 + times a day. You may even have the child who has the need to text his/her BFF all day long. This is becoming more and more common.
Richard Wood, vice president of Nielsen Mobile, discussing the company's Mobile Kids Insights report, recently said: "Tweens have grown up with mobile phones and expect them to do much more than make a call." Is it just the younger market with higher expectations?
Assuming the "need" of the tween/teen to have a cell phone is a real need, having a phone that just makes calls will not do. The phones need to make a phone call home, be able to text their BFF's, take a picture of him/herself for the social networking site, and the phone must be able to download the latest song for a ring tone to match the personality of anyone calling. Extra bonus points if the phone can hold their entire music collection, surf the Web and play the latest games and get the latest apps. They almost don't even need the cell phone to make calls.
I don't think this is exactly what Alexander Graham Bell had in mind.
As an adult, parent and a kids safety advocate and professional, I "need" the cell phones to be able to make a phone call, have safety features and parental controls built in. Actually, for my own use I also need it to access my email.
What do you expect out of a cell phone? At what age do you think of all the features that are now available are "needed"?
Cell Block
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Marcelo Adaes 2-19-2010 @ 3:55PM
As a parent of a three years old boy, I sometimes get frustrated when I arrive home and he says "Daddy!! May I use you cell phone?". So I had him my iPhone and he plays on more than 20 games that I downloaded for him.
Sometimes he gets bored of playing the games, and try to use other phones applications. As far as I know, he did already create online chess games with several people that I had to play against, and deleted one or two applications.
I see that in a future not very far from today I will get him surfing on web. I did not searched for URL filtering applications for iPhone, I don't know even if they exist, but I will soon have look for it. Anyone has any suggestion?
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