3 months ago
25
A Barbie-branded phone has been launched in the UK and Europe with the aim – its makers say – of helping young people take a break from their smartphones.
It is a very pink and fundamentally very basic device, with no front camera, only one game and very limited access to the internet.
Manufacturer HMD, which also makes phones for Nokia, says it's trying to tap into what it calls a "surge" of people wanting a smaller "digital impact" on their lives.
But others say that would be better achieved by teaching people how to use their devices in a healthier and more controlled way.
There are growing calls from parents and campaigners to limit the time children spend on smartphones, or even ban the devices completely.
Their concerns range from the suspicion children will end up with shorter attention spans, to the fear that they might be exposed to harmful or illegal content.
Some schools are taking action, perhaps most eye-catchingly the UK's best known fee-paying school, Eton College. It is providing some of its pupils with "brick" phones – also sometimes called feature phones – which can only send and receive texts and calls.
It says it wants to "balance the benefits and challenges that technology brings to schools."
And this week mobile network EE waded into the debate by advising parents not to allow their under-11s smartphones at all.
Lars Silberbauer, a senior executive at HMD, says it is these trends his firm is responding to.
"We've seen this surge which started in the US coming to Europe, that more and more people actually want to not be having a digital experience all the time," he said.
Some may be sceptical about how truly noble Mr Silberbauer's motives are – and he did concede he would “love” to be able to incorporate a messaging platform like WhatsApp into the Barbie phone.
But I spent a day using it and, for now, there is little doubt that as a digital detox it was certainly effective because of its very limited functionality.
It is mirror-fronted flip phone and has no app store or touch screen. I had no social media at all, and the phone can not receive anything more advanced than SMS messages.
That means no text messages with "read receipts" or the function to see when someone is typing. It is the default setting on many smartphones – so I didn’t get many text messages either.
Even with predictive text enabled I found the numbers and letters keypad much slower than a touchscreen keyboard and as a result I ended up calling more people than usual, which perhaps was no bad thing.
And I discovered there are only so many times you can play the retro Nokia game Snake, even when it’s called Malibu Snake and it's pink.
But the handset certainly attracted a lot of attention, especially from girls and young women, as I walked around Glasgow city centre with it.
There is of course the danger that instead of being pestered for a smartphone, parents will find themselves being pestered for a piece of Barbie merchandise - which may be just as unwelcome.
The phone has a launch price of £99 in the UK – twice what you would pay for a non-branded Nokia feature phone. There are plenty of other phones on the market that offer the same limited functionality, but without any kind of big corporate tie in.
"I’d imagine quite a few people will be tempted to buy it as a bit of fun, but in reality, everyone is so dependent on their smartphones that anything more than the odd day of detox will be a stretch," says Ben Wood, a phone expert who has his own museum of devices released over the years.
Nonetheless, he says, there is a market for what are sometimes called "dumbphones". His firm, CCS Insight, estimates that around 400,000 will be sold in the UK this year.
"That's an attractive niche for a company like HMD", he says.
Some experts suggest that withdrawing smartphones is no real solution – they are woven into our lives, after all – and instead children need to be taught how to use them in a healthy and safe way.
"What we should be doing instead is thinking about, how do we build really good, really long term, sustainable digital literacy skills in that generation," says Pete Etchells, professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa university, who has written extensively about the issue of screen time.
“I think we could all be better at using our phones in a healthier and more resilient way," he said.
HMD is also working on a separate project, a new device which it is designing in collaboration with parents. It says more than 1,000 people have signed up to work on it so far.
And Mr Silberbaum concedes that the resulting handset may well end up being something that sits somewhere between a dumbphone and a smartphone.
“Do I want the smartphone with all the bells and whistles, or do I want to have something that can actually help me have a more considered approach to digital? That's the choice we want to deliver,” he said.
