Inside Relay, the Anti-Smartphone for Kids

Every parent has a moment when they think of giving their kid a telephone. For Chris Chuang, the CEO of small wireless carrier Republic Wireless, it was when his sons got "lost" in the woods.

"My boys were out in the forest behind our house. As nosotros were out in that location, information technology became closer to dusk and we couldn't encounter them. So I stepped outside—'boys, time for dinner, come home.' No response. Equally my voice gets louder, and then does my feet and worry in my centre … so I keep yelling for them, and [am met] with silence."

Eventually, Chuang found his kids; they were playing hide and seek as it got dark, they couldn't hear him, and it was fine. But dissimilar about of us, Chuang runs a wireless carrier, so he got the company working on a project to go along tabs on kids while they're outside and maybe practise something about screen addiction, too.

Commonwealth Wireless'southward Relay, launching today, is a unique little gadget that's not quite a phone and not quite a walkie-talkie. It's a colored square with no screen and a big push button in the middle, designed for kids ages half dozen-11.

Push the button, and it can transport walkie-talkie-like letters to other Relay devices or a parent's cell telephone, equally long as the parental telephone is running the Relay app. The Relay also plays music, and in the future information technology may have Google Assistant or Alexa. Relays don't have regular phone numbers, and can't exist contacted by outsiders.

Commonwealth gave us early access to the device and to its production procedure, then we could see how this unusual phone-similar device came to exist. Check out our full review, which explains how it works. The bigger question is, volition parents purchase it?

Kids Have Phones Now

According to a UK government written report cited by analyst Benedict Evans, 25 percernt of nine-yr-olds in the Britain have smartphones, as practise 46 percentage of 10-year-olds and 71 percent of 11-yr-olds. But hither's a twist: more kids from viii-11 had "phones" in 2022 than they exercise now, although that number is creeping support. The departure: they used to have non-smartphones, which then died out, but parents have shown resistance to replacing them all with smartphones.

A 2022 Nielsen report says that in the Us, fifteen per centum of kids get phones at age 9, and some other 22 percent at age ten. Ninety pct of parents desire to use their phones to communicate with their kids, merely 66 percent are getting them one because "they take been asking for it for a while."

"The majority of kids are getting cell phones betwixt the ages of 10 and 12," said Michael Levine of Sesame Workshop. "It used to be high school age, and now it's moved down to middle schoolhouse historic period."

Of those mobile kids, 81 percent ship texts and 59 per centum download apps, leading 71 percent of parents to worry that their kids are spending too much fourth dimension with their phones.

That last flake was definitely a theme at a Republic Wireless-run focus grouping I visited with execs. Because the parents in that location had younger kids, who generally had tablets, the demon that most frequently came up was YouTube. YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. Go those kids off the screens somehow, the parents said.

"Parents are looking for means to go their kids to accept a pause from using phones, if they have them, and trying to minimize screen time," said Jennifer Hanley, VP of Legal and Policy for the Family Online Safety Found (FOSI), herself fresh from doing a presentation to parents.

Security concerns didn't come upwardly much at the focus group, but a study commissioned past FOSI says it's the No. i worry parents take near "connected toys." Parents' top business concern is that hackers, cyber criminals, and identity thieves could become access to personal data through online toys, the study says.

Many parents don't seem terribly comfy with getting their kids smartphones, just they practice it anyway. In that FOSI study, 31 percent of parents said that the harms of having a smartphone outweighed the benefits.

Chuang said he's seen plenty of families buying Republic's lowest-toll plans and inexpensive smartphones for their tweens. "Equally we saw this happening more and more, nosotros felt similar this isn't the all-time answer for an 11-year-sometime, 12-year-one-time. Information technology was the wrong answer, given the screen addiction issues that smartphones tin can raise," he said.

So Republic came upwardly with the basic plan for the Relay: it has to connect both parents and kids, it has to have some "fun" features, and information technology tin't take a screen.

Dead Ends and Redirections

Then how long does it take to get a new gadget like this from concept to reality? About two years. The offset Relay looked a lot like an older iPod nano—a vertically oriented device, with a click bike.

"The idea at the time was that information technology would cache things, like voicemail. We would store all the voicemails that you would have coming in from your contacts, and then you'd actually have a cursor location where you lot motility through these messages and listen to them sequentially," said Matt Newton, Republic's SVP of hardware.

Navigating a store-and-frontwards mailbox turned out to be too hard on a device without a screen, said Sai Rathnam, Commonwealth'south CTO. "The more I saw users struggling with that interface, the more I realized that it's nigh impossible."

Security was likewise an issue. When you're storing letters, yous have to call back about how to store them securely and who tin can access them.

And then the company shifted to the walkie-talkie model, 3D printing diverse prototypes and spinning them out. 1 model, with the speaker on the dorsum, was too hard to hear, and so that i had to go. A fabric cover looked skilful, but kept tearing when people pulled it out of their pockets, according to Newton. A lanyard loop had to go so they could use the whole exterior of the device as an LTE antenna. MicroUSB was too hard for kids to plug in, so they came up with a magnetic connector. A custom battery fills virtually of the bottom of the device: bigger than a smartwatch battery, but smaller than a telephone battery.

The Relay'southward messages disappear as soon equally they're sent, and the devices take no style to make or receive standard phone calls, making the system relatively hard to abuse.

"There's absolutely no data that is stored anywhere, on our servers or on third-political party servers. The messages are transferred deeply using TLS," Rathnam said.

For a while, they wanted the device to be vocalization-activated, with an Alexa-like interface. "We realized information technology was but a footling slow, a little kind of kludgey, and it wasn't piece of cake for the kids … information technology'south not a natural thing to do, to say, 'X keyword, call whoever,'" Commonwealth president Jim Mulcahy said.

Kids pitched in a few features. Mulcahy saw his girl and her friends just trying to brand their own voices come out of each others' Relays; that led to an "repeat" feature where it repeats your words back to you in a funny voice.

Each smaller iteration took two to three months, prototyping hardware with MakerBot 3D printers and coding on Raspberry Pis, Newton said; bigger moves took iv to five months.

"This is ii years of developing a mobile product," Newton said.

Who Is Republic Wireless?

We didn't await something similar this to come from Republic Wireless, just it makes sense. Republic is a mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO: a wireless carrier that doesn't run its own towers, but uses a mix of Wi-Fi, Dart, and T-Mobile towers to send its calls.

Intense engineering always set Democracy apart from more cost-focused MVNOs like TracFone. The start Democracy phones had custom firmware to enable Wi-Fi calling, earlier than the big four carriers did. Subsequently, the company invented "bonded calling," which sends calls over Wi-Fi and cellular networks simultaneously.

So it has engineers—a lot of them. They've only never built hardware before. Fortunately for Republic, Motorola was laying off a agglomeration of engineers in 2022, so Democracy picked upwardly those Motorola engineers and gave them the Relay idea to work with.

Republic already has another hardware projection in the pipeline: the Anywhere HQ, which is a combination domicile telephone and Google Assistant speaker.

With sectional hardware, Republic is trying to fight the commoditization of MVNO service. Over the by few years, the globe of low-cost, virtual carriers has really boomed, largely thanks to T-Mobile and Sprint offering aggressive wholesale rates. Many sell very similar, cheap, easily configurable plans on the aforementioned networks.

To some extent, Republic is pulling the oldest trick in the wireless carrier book. In the years before iPhones and Galaxies were everywhere, the large wireless carriers tried to attract and keep customers with exclusive phones. Republic is doing the same: it'south just inventing them itself.

Is It Cool Enough?

Cell phone companies have been trying to figure out how to give kids both connectivity and safety for decades at present. Nosotros saw our get-go restricted-dialing kids' phones in 2005: the Enfora TicTalk, the Firefly, and the LG Migo. They were all designed to permit kids only call a few numbers, primarily their parents. Later, the industry switched to wearables and gave them tracking abilities, with kids' smartwatches similar the Filip, Tinitell, and LG Gizmo series.

The makers of these devices are all either out of business, don't want to talk, or both. Nosotros approached LG, ZTE, Sprint, and Verizon and they didn't want to discuss kids' devices. Tinitell only went out of business; Filip transitioned to being a software company. It's hard out there.

Tinitell

Mulcahy says the problem is that kids don't detect the devices to be fun. He has a signal: they're all similar little ankle bracelets for your short, dearest prisoners. Kids also want to talk to their friends, he said. What he didn't say, what might get Relay into some problem, is that they want to text those friends, too.

"Kid culture is and so powerful in influencing parents' choices, and [restricted phones are] just not a absurd toy," Sesame Workshop's Levine cautioned.

Analyst Carolina Milanesi of Artistic Strategies agreed, maxim there's a mismatch between what parents who are buying these gadget want, and what kids actually desire.

"When the kids are old enough to actually want a phone they want an iPhone or a Galaxy S, non a kids' phone," she said. "Dorsum in the day, when the phone was just about making a call, you could have peradventure got away with a phone that was cheaper and lower specs but at present kids pay attention to cameras, design and brand."

Not Quite a Phone

Taking the Relay to a focus group, I saw a rowdy agglomeration of kids playing with them energetically and loving them. My 6-year-onetime niece climbed up into my lap, held one upwards, and said very seriously, "if you desire to talk to someone, yous need a walkie-talkie."

After giving the device to my 12-twelvemonth-one-time daughter for a week, I've seen the pluses and minuses. The Relay isn't a fully functional phone, only that's the point. It was helpful when I sent her to the shop, and we chatted forth the way. She had a smash using it with a group of friends as they scoured the street in groups for a newsletter project.

Giving it to a faraway friend of hers, though, presented some logistical challenges. The kids had to organize times to talk to each other, which meant they needed to get on phones or PCs anyway, and that got awkward enough that eventually they simply fell back on texting.

So the Relay isn't a comprehensive replacement for a smartphone; Republic will freely admit it isn't. "It's a toy," my daughter said to me. At $149 for a pack of ii, plus $half-dozen.99/calendar month for unlimited use, the big question is whether parents and kids will choose this over a phone.

Avi Greengart, an analyst for Global Data, didn't recollect the Relay is going to make a dent in the smartphone market. Simply it could yet observe a niche.

"I don't expect it to succeed unless Democracy lowers the price and targets specific user communities who desire to limit their children's net admission while maintaining basic communication. I run across piffling chance of Relay displacing smartphones as the main way families communicate, just it could become a hit with camping families or some religious groups," Greengart said.

"I think in that location's a niche, but it's competing with a lot of stuff that's similarly priced and offers a lot more functionality," Sesame Workshop's Levine agreed.