News: A Trackerphone for Kids

In this day and age a childs safety and well being is always at the front of any parent or guardians mind.  You want your child to be able to do as they please outdoors or away from the home, yet be protective whilst not restricting them. This might be easier said than done in some parts of the world!

Snowfox the Trackerphone for Kids

A team of 80+, mostly ex-Nokia engineers and designers at Haltain have come up with a great idea to help connect parents to their children without equipping them with a full blown mobile phone.

The Snowfox trackerphone is a ready to use, out of the box solution which is simple enough for your child to operate but detailed enough to provide you with peace of mind.

Once you have synced the device to the free smartphone app on your handset (iOS | Android) you go through a short set up process which seems straightforward; you are then good to go.

The child can carry the Snowfox like a mobile phone and use it as they wish to stay in touch with you or other nominated adults or family members. There is only one button on the unit:

• 1 sec button press: “is thinking about you” message to the application.
• 3 sec button press: “Call me” request to the application.
• Restart: hold down the button for 30 seconds.
• Power on: hold down the button for 2-3 seconds.

There is no power off option available to the child, that can only be done from the app.

As a safety feature it is not possible for the child to hang up or end the call with the parent, that needs to be done from your smartphone.

Our favorite feature, and one I have looked for before is an easy to use tracker method using GPS. Snowfox and the app provide this via the embedded sim card which makes all of this possible.

There is a promo video up on Vimeo and a more detailed one on their indiegogo page where the team are currently seeking backers.

As mentioned, it works on a sim card and seeks the strongest available signal at all times. For those in the UK, they use EE, o2, Vodafone and 3 which we would expect to keep the Snowfox contactable nearly all of the time. At launch the trackerphone will work in 10 countries and a list of supported networks for each is under the updates section of the funding page.

Charging is done via USB and a full charge should see the unit last a full week. You can also add another 4 adults to link with the tracker and receive notifications and/or calls.

At the time of writing you can pick up a Snowfox trackerphone for $99 (expected retail will be $149) and includes one month free subscription for the sim.  Then it is €9.90 per month on a pay as you go basis for the sim. This includes everything so there will be no large bills etc.