Hacker News Reader

Comment by tdicola | Hacker News Reader

It's funny to think in another 20 years kids might see this movie and wonder what are those weird small rooms with phones that people go into all the time. And they have to pay money to make a call!?

View on HN

I can already tell you that the idea that a phone number calls a house rather than a person is foreign to a 7-year-old.

Which is really as it should be. I also find it amusing when people are SHOCKED that a kid would have a cell phone. Sure, they don't need an extravagant $700 smartphone, but who needs a cell phone more? The adult with multiple credit cards, money, reliable transportation, and sits at a desk 8 hours a day with a telephone sitting right there on it? (and then commutes by comfortable car to a house that likely has a landline.. or at least used to when I originally formulated this argument)? Or the kid who rarely has access to a landline, no credit card, no transportation of their own, relies on others (school bus, parents, etc) for transportation to a schedule that might vary each day of the week, and who is much more likely to be "stuck" somewhere?

Perhaps they are available everywhere and I haven't noticed, but in Japan they have cellphones with 4 programmable buttons on them. You can't call anybody other than those 4 people. They are quite popular as emergency cell phones for children and the elderly (the latter because the buttons are really easy to push).

I met an one of the entrepreneurs behind the jitterbug(now known as a different company). Initially they focused it at parents wanting phones for their children, but now it's mostly for the elderly.

He said they failed at their market research - they tried to make something that appealed to parents, but neglected to see what kids actually wanted(to have things like the adults do). American kids knew it wasn't a real phone, and rejected it. Their parents then got them a flip phone instead of a "kiddie phone".

My 7 year old recently asked me, "What were iPhone's like when you were a kid?"

Uh...

My six year old pointed at a pay phone asking "What's that?"

"It's a phone."

"No it's not! Where's the screen?"

I grinned and told him it has no screen, he was baffled as to how to use it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com