Campaigners 'thrilled' as St Albans aims to be smartphone-free for under-14s

theguardian.com

19 points·6LLvveMx2koXfwn··5 comments

Kind of ironic that a smartphone is bad but a “text and call” phone is good. You can turn a smartphone into a text and call phone with parental controls. Maybe these schools should educate parents on them. I’m not even sure if they still sell any text and call phones in the US. The old ones will not work at least with the carrier changes iirc.

I will say that even with text and call phones of my generation we were just as bad. Texting t9 into hoodie pockets all through class. The same “mean girls” issues that people harp on with smartphones predate the tech. Even my grandparents had cruel popular kid cliques in school. And unlike internet age kids they had literally no outlet from it.

The old phones won't work because they cannot connect to modern networks. The hardware of the phone itself is the issue.

However, there are still phones that are just for texting and calling, previously these were referred to as feature phones or basic phones. For example, the Orbic Journey or TCL Flip. As far as I know these all run Android now but lack the ability to install apps and have small screens.

It’s about social media.

This is fantastic, and needs to become the default. It's a bit strange to me that every effort I've seen for this has been outside of the US. Is anyone aware of any effort, successful or otherwise, to do this inside the US? Are we simply too smartphone dependent to even consider such a move?

When companies are more powerful than the government and they want to sell more products at whatever cost… you get the idea.

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