Barbie Can Conquer Smartphone Addiction, A Business Claims.
A Barbie-branded phone has been released in the UK and Europe, with the goal, according to its creators, of allowing young people to take a break from their smartphones.
It’s a very pink, very basic smartphone with no front camera, only one game, and extremely restricted internet connection.
HMD, which also builds phones for Nokia, says it’s attempting to capitalize on what it terms a “surge” of consumers seeking a smaller “digital impact” in their life.
Others, however, believe that educating people how to use their devices in a healthier and more controlled manner would be more effective.
Parents and campaigners are increasingly calling for restrictions on how much time youngsters spend on smartphones, if not outright bans.
Their concerns vary from the notion that children will have shorter attention spans to the possibility of being exposed to hazardous or unlawful content.
Some schools are taking action, probably most notably Eton College, the UK’s most well-known fee-paying school. It is supplying some of its students with “brick” phones, sometimes known as feature phones, which can only send and receive messages and calls.
It aims to “balance the benefits and challenges that technology brings to schools.”
This week, mobile network EE weighed in on the controversy by encouraging parents not to give their children under the age of 11 access to cellphones.
HMD’s senior executive, Lars Silberbauer, says the company is responding to these changes.
“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 told me.
Digital detox
Some may question Mr Silberbauer’s true intentions, and he did admit that he would “love” to be able to add a messaging network such as WhatsApp into the Barbie phone.
However, after using it for a day, there is little doubt that it was successful as a digital detox, despite its restricted functionality.
It’s a mirror-fronted flip phone with no app store or touchscreen. I had no social media, and my phone couldn’t receive anything more complex than SMS messages.
This means no text messages with “read receipts” or the ability to see when someone is typing. It is the default setting on many smartphones, therefore I did not receive many text messages either.
Even with predictive text activated, I found the numbers and letters keypad to be significantly slower than a touchscreen keyboard, causing me to call more people than normal, which may not have been a terrible thing.
And I learned there are just so many times you can play the classic Nokia game Snake, even if it’s called Malibu Snake and is pink.
But the handset drew a lot of attention, particularly from girls and young ladies, as I went around Glasgow’s city core with it.
Of course, there is the risk that instead of being pestered for a smartphone, parents may be pestered with Barbie stuff, which may be equally unwelcome.
In the UK, the phone will cost £99 upon launch, which is twice the price of a non-branded Nokia feature phone. There are lots of alternative phones on the market with similar restricted capabilities but no significant 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 handsets produced throughout the years.
Nonetheless, he claims that there is a market for “dumbphones”. His company, CCS Insight, predicts that approximately 400,000 will be sold in the UK this year.
“That’s an attractive niche for a company like HMD” , according to him.
According to some experts, withdrawing smartphones is not a viable option because they are so ingrained in our lives; instead, children should be taught how to use them in a healthy and safe manner.
“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, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University who has written extensively about screen time.
“I think we could all be better at using our phones in a healthier and more resilient way,” he told me.
HMD is also working on a different project, a new device that it will design in partnership with parents. It states that more than 1,000 people have already signed up to work on it.
Mr Silberbaum admits that the resulting handset may end up being halfway between a dumbphone and a smartphone.
“Do I want a smartphone with all the bells and whistles, or do I want something that would help me take a more deliberate approach to digital? “That is the option we want to provide,” he stated
