Mother and father grapple with the fashionable day query of whether or not to provide their youngsters phones for staying in touch and conserving 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 on the machine degree. Mother and father use an AT&T AmiGo app on their iOS or Android cellphone to handle apps, settings and screentime limits on the child’s cellphone; the AmiGo software program works solely with this AmiGo Jr. Cellphone.
The AmiGo Jr. is a Samsung Galaxy A16 cellphone 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 foremost digital camera, 5-megapixel ultrawide digital camera and 2-megapixel macro digital camera. The cellphone is on the market solely in black.
The cellphone is on the market now online at AT&T, in AT&T shops and through the MyAT&T app, and priced at $3 a month for a 36-month contract. Mother and father additionally must buy an unlimited data line on their cellphone plan for the cellphone beginning at $61 a month, plus pay a $35 activation price.
Providing a reasonable older digital camera for a kid’s use is not new — it is how mother and father usually arrange units for teenagers. The Galaxy A16 was launched in January 2025. What makes the AmiGo Jr. totally different is the AmiGo app implementing parental controls on the machine degree underneath Android 16, in response to an AT&T spokesperson. Past the parental management options supplied in Android, the AmiGo software provides Protected Zones that generate alerts when the cellphone has entered or exited them and a College Mode for proscribing options throughout occasions when their consideration ought to be centered away from the display screen.
“After intensive, candid conversations with mother and father, we heard a transparent message: This is not only a machine determination — it is a deeply private one about belief, security and staying related,” mentioned Erin Scarborough, AT&T senior vice chairman of income administration and commercialization, in a press release. “Creating a child’s cellphone was the pure and overdue subsequent step for us.”
The corporate cited the truth that 40% of its present clients are mother and father as incentive to develop the AmiGo Jr. Cellphone. And primarily based by itself analysis, 60% of fogeys of youngsters as much as age 12 take into account a smartphone to be a security important.
Constructing telephones for teenagers shouldn’t be a novel idea; CNET’s Katie Collins appeared on the HMD Fusion X1 ultimately 12 months’s Mobile World Congress, for instance. And system-based parental controls have additionally grow to be more robust lately, at the same time as a recent study suggests that folks ought to wait till the age of 13 to provide their youngsters a cellphone.
Additionally out there now’s the AT&T AmiGo Jr. Watch 2, a extra sturdy smartwatch that ties into AT&T’s AmiGo system.
