Having changed cell phone carriers earlier this year we
ended up with some older Android phones that were not compatible with the new
carrier’s network. I initially
considered selling them but realized I likely would not get much for them I
decided to re-purpose them instead. I
decided to set them up as mini Wi-Fi tablets for my boys. The boys being nine and five years old I was
not sure if they were ready for their own cell phones. This would be an experiment.
First thing I did was complete a factory reset on both
phones. Then I turned off the connection
to the cell towers. When setting up the
phones I created a Gmail and a Google Voice number for each boy. We periodically pull up the Gmail accounts
via Thunderbird so we can review everything that is coming to them. After that I installed a few apps to make the
phones useful.
Currently the boys are using Google Voice & GTalk phone
by Mo+ to make calls over WiFi.
Apparently Google has recently rolled WiFi calling into Hangouts, so I
will have to look into that. The next
app was Netflix. This is a real family
peace keeper, sometimes the adults want to watch one show, and the boys another,
this way they could quietly watch their show while all of us were sitting on
the couch together.
All in all it has been a very good experiment. So far I have only had to remove one minor
bit of malware from one phone and periodically help my youngest free up space
by deleting games he downloaded but is not playing. If you have kids in your life and have old
Android phones I encourage you to consider this super easy project.
No comments:
Post a Comment