Kajeet: Cell Phones with Training Wheels for Tweens

By Michelle Lamar: Source: MamaGloss

Kajeet mobile phones are a great option for families who are considering a first cell phone — I call them “cell phones with training wheels.” If you want to get your tween a mobile phone but you’re worried about safety and usage, this phone is a great way to ease you and your child into the technology and the responsibilities that come with it.

Our family discovered Kajeet a few years ago, when we were looking for a phone for our then 12-year-old daughter. At a new school and playing on a basketball team with games and practices all over the place, my husband and I wanted her to have a way to call home if she needed to but we weren’t quite ready to let her have have her own phone. The company’s pay-as-you-go service and the parenting controls were a great solution for our family.

When our daughter entered high school, we switched her over to our family mobile plan—and “took the training wheels off” her cell phone. Our youngest daughter is 11-years-old and now she has a Kajeet cell phone. Just like her sister, we are taking it slowly, so she can learn how to use a cell phone responsibly.

Kajeet makes communicating with a cell phone easy and safe for kids thanks to a variety of free parental controls. Mom and Dad can block calls, picture messaging, and text messaging. The phone lets parents determine when, how and how much it can be used by their children.

The company was founded by three fathers, who wanted a service their tweens could use. Kajeet CEO Daniel Neal says they designed the service as dads first:

Thinking of our own kids, we designed a service to provide them with everything they need to safely explore the exciting new world of mobile tech.

Find out more about Kajeet on their website, Kajeet.com.

Samsung Launches S3650 Corby Touchscreen Cell Phone For Social Networking Teens

Snapshot by Brian James Kirk ; Source: Mobile Burn

Samsung has launched the S3650 Corby, an affordable touchscreen handset designed for teen mobile users. The Corby has a contoured design and comes in yellow, white, orange, and pink with additional interchangeable and fashionable back covers available.

The device is built on Samsung's finger-friendly Touchwiz user interface. TouchWiz should look sharp on the Corby's 2.8-inch QVGA touchscreen display, which also includes haptic feedback. Users can download new widgets for the user interface through Samsung's online store with the phone's GSM/EDGE data connectivity. Through Samsung's Social Networking Service, users can update their status across their favorite social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Users can also upload content, like photos and videos created with the Corby's 2.0 megapixel camera, to YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, and even Photobucket. Music collections can be saved onto microSD^(INFO) cards. The Corby offers Bluetooth headsets support, as well.

The Samsung S3650 Corby will be available in a handful of colors Europe later this month for 150 EUR (US$214).

Walkman More Cumbersome than iPod, Teen Discovers

by Margaret Lyons
Original Post: Entertainment Weekly

Ah, youth. A British 13-year-old test drove an old-ass Sony Walkman instead of his iPod this weekend, and lo, the results were comical.

"From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets," he writes. Truth! (Though as the years wore on, Walkmen did shrink down a bit.) But it gets better: "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape," writes the tech-savvy youth. He creates his own version of "shuffle" "simply by holding down 'rewind; and releasing it randomly." Except any one-time Walkman owner knows that's dancing with the devil.

"I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, 'Walkmans eat tapes.' So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day." Worse than being musicless for the day, pal, is losing that tape forever. Also, don't store tapes near nickels. Man, the good old days.

As cumbersome as the Walkman was compared to the iPod (or other MP3 players), it was still much better than portable CD players which never, ever stopped sucking.