Parents grapple with the modern-day query of whether or not to present their youngsters telephones for staying in contact and retaining tabs on their whereabouts, whereas additionally navigating the realities of an excessive amount of display screen time and shielding them from the corrosive results of social media.
AT&T simply launched its personal reply, the AmiGo Jr. Phone, a Samsung smartphone with an AmiGo app that applies parental controls at the gadget stage. Parents use an AT&T AmiGo app on their iOS or Android telephone to handle apps, settings and screentime limits on the child’s telephone; the AmiGo software program works solely with this AmiGo Jr. Phone.
The AmiGo Jr. is a Samsung Galaxy A16 telephone with a 6.7-inch show, 128GB of storage and a 5,000 mAh battery. It has a trio of cameras on the again: a 50-megapixel primary digicam, 5-megapixel ultrawide digicam and 2-megapixel macro digicam. The telephone is out there solely in black.
The telephone is out there now on-line at AT&T, in AT&T shops and by way of the MyAT&T app, and priced at $3 a month for a 36-month contract. Parents additionally must buy an limitless information line on their telephone plan for the telephone beginning at $61 a month, plus pay a $35 activation charge.
Offering a cheap older digicam for a kid’s use is not new — it is how mother and father typically arrange units for youths. The Galaxy A16 was launched in January 2025. What makes the AmiGo Jr. totally different is the AmiGo app implementing parental controls at the gadget stage below Android 16, in accordance with an AT&T spokesperson. Beyond the parental management options supplied in Android, the AmiGo software program provides Safe Zones that generate alerts when the telephone has entered or exited them and a School Mode for proscribing options throughout instances when their consideration needs to be targeted away from the display screen.
“After intensive, candid conversations with mother and father, we heard a transparent message: This is not only a gadget choice — it is a deeply private one about belief, security and staying linked,” mentioned Erin Scarborough, AT&T senior vice chairman of income administration and commercialization, in an announcement. “Creating a child’s telephone was the pure and overdue subsequent step for us.”
The firm cited the undeniable fact that 40% of its present clients are mother and father as incentive to develop the AmiGo Jr. Phone. And based mostly by itself analysis, 60% of oldsters of children as much as age 12 take into account a smartphone to be a security important.
Building telephones for youths just isn’t a novel idea; CNET’s Katie Collins checked out the HMD Fusion X1 finally 12 months’s Mobile World Congress, for instance. And system-based parental controls have additionally turn out to be extra strong in latest years, at the same time as a latest examine suggests that folks ought to wait till the age of 13 to present their youngsters a telephone.
Also out there now’s the AT&T AmiGo Jr. Watch 2, a extra sturdy smartwatch that ties into AT&T’s AmiGo system.