mobiles2go i-Kids review: mobiles2go i-Kids

Design

4.5

mobiles2go i-Kids

The Good

Conveniently small. Functions well as just a barebones mobile phone.

The Bad

GPS doesn’t always find the device. Quite expensive. Emergency button can fail with voicemail. Set up of services through the website is frustrating. Billing service hasn’t launched even though the product has.

The Bottom Line

The i-Kids is a good idea for worried parents and will work for the most part, but the missing features, incomplete device finding ability, frustrating technical issues, high costs and faulty emergency service all lead to the conclusion that a parent truly worried about their child’s safety wouldn’t trust the i-Kids to protect their child from danger.

The i-Kids seems suitably designed for young children and comes in two different colour patterns -- one presumably suited for girls (pink/lime) and the other for boys (blue/azure). It has a small form factor and is very light, which helps if you'd like to string it around your child's neck. It has two horn-shaped protuberances that we assume to be the extra aerials needed for its inbuilt GPS. The battery has a child-proof, tamper-proof cover using a plug that supposedly requires tweezers to take off, though with some effort it could be removed via alternative methods. Thoughtfully, mobiles2go includes spare rubber plugs in the package.

The i-Kids has few buttons, attempting quite appropriately to be as simple and easy to use as possible. Rather than a number-pad, it has 4 parent-programmable buttons. It has screen-lock and volume control buttons, and, strangely, an earphone jack. Navigating the menu is an uncomfortable experience with one hand due to the positioning of the buttons, and changing settings is made doubly hard with the tiny size and miniature, two-line LCD screen. The i-Kids' design is suitable for its purpose, however, and once configured, shouldn't cause any grief.

Features

The i-Kids is hardly an ordinary phone due to its unique child-tracking service. Configured via the Internet, the i-Kids will for eight hours of the day record the location of your child at ten minute intervals. The places your child has visited are displayed on a map once you log in to mobile2go's Web site using your browser. Additionally, you are able to set three safety zones. If the i-Kids is detected to be outside the safety zone, a message will be sent to your phone indicating this -- though only three alerts can be sent in one month without cost. Safety zones can only be in circles, and the radius cannot be less than 250m. It took a bit of effort to find the right street using the search function to locate our CNET offices.

You can also locate your child on command via SMS or the Web. As well, the i-Kids can receive but not send SMS messages. The i-Kids service quite a pricey deal -- after paying $229 for the handset and $36 for activation, the monthly fee is $28 and includes 30 minutes talk time, 10 traces and 3 changes of settings. Once you set these up it costs money to trace your child, change settings and be alerted via SMS of their leaving the safety zone.

One of the features of the i-Kids is that it only has 7 buttons on the front. 4 of them, when pressed, will call the numbers that parent sets on the Web site. This is to stop the child calling whomever they want to. A fifth button is for emergency situations, and when pressed it will cycle through the programmed numbers and if neither one answers it will put the child through to a helpdesk.

It's reasonable that the i-Kids is so barebones to keep down on size and safety issues, but for a device so limited the cost is a bit prohibitive. Speaking of costs, the billing information site that users are sent to from the included manual wasn't operational at the time of review, which was post release, so we were unable to see how the costs would be adding up or looking at billing details in real-time. It would be worryingly hard for an average parent purchasing this in the shops to set up and understand the system, seeing the trouble we at CNET experienced. The missing billing component, talked about as operational in the i-Kids box, is fabled to be "coming soon" on the Web site.

Performance

The GPS had a lot of trouble locating the device in our office and in the more built-up areas of Sydney, which was disappointing for something hailed as a safety measure. The battery life was not an issue, though it's much less than you would expect, presumably due to the inclusion of the GPS. A handy feature is that parents are alerted by SMS when the battery is low.

Unfortunately, when we pressed the emergency button, it went through one number successfully, but when the second one's voicemail system came through, it just kept looping and looping and never went through to the help desk. Obviously the system can't handle certain voicemail types -- which is potentially a serious flaw for a child in distress.

On the other hand, we never had a problem dialing the i-Kids or dialing from it, it functioned just a mobile phone should in that regard. The setting of the safety zones is done with Java in the browser, and is slow and clunky to use -- a faster desktop option would have been appreciated. The WAP interface for phone users was awkward and limited, though we had no troubles with the SMS traces.