The internet is a dangerous place, if abused. Which is why companies like ThePhoneCloud with their new PX1 mobile is a kind of shining light for children who are at an age of getting into mobile phones, and especially social media.
Social media and use of the internet has integrated into everybody’s lives, not just children. And there are some dark corners of the world wide web. The PX1 Mobile’s aim is to keep your children safe when online.
The PX1 Mobile is pretty much the same as most other budget handset mobiles. It comes in at around £200 online, and for that you get a pretty nice looking handset. It has a 1280 x 720 resolution 5.5″ screen which admittedly isn’t the highest in modern day mobiles, but sharp enough to read web pages or text within your favourite apps.
There’s 32GB of on-board storage which is it, no microSD card support which is a bit of a shame, as I know the younger generations love their selfies. I could not find any information on which processor this phone is rocking, but do know it’s a Quadcore clocked at 1.8GHz according to the phone’s settings. It also has 2GB RAM too backing that up.
I thought I’d run a Geekbench 4 benchmark, just to see the results, and they were pretty much where I expected them to be. It’s not a very powerful phone, at all compared to other £200 handsets on the market. The Honor 7X we recently looked at smashed this out of the park for example, as does something like a Moto G5. But if it’s a basic handset for scrolling your Facebook feed or updating your Instagram, it’s alright.
The camera unfortunately is a little sub-par too, producing very low quality shots, even in the day time. You have a choice of normal mode, panoramic or face beauty which smooths out your features. Not all bad, but I just wish the quality was a little better to match other £200 smartphones. There’s an 8-megapixel sensor inside for stills, and for video I’m not too sure on the resolution as you only get an option for Low, Medium, High and Fine.
But enough about the spec, that’s not really what this handset is about. I said above it can protect children from the harsh online world, and it can do it to a parent’s judgement. Everything is controlled from an online dashboard.
I would show you more but below that snipping is a large GPS map, and I want to protect myself as much as possible. But as you can see you can literally check on everything your kid is getting up to on that device. You can even see the app that they are using. You can see that during this snipping I was running a Geekbench 4 website, and the last website that was visited on this handset was Yahoo. On the right you have other options like disabling internet access, blocking certain websites and look at web histories.
You can even set banned keywords on the phone too, which means that internet searches containing these words will be blocked. There are presets of course which contain literally every bad word I can think of ever, but you do have the ability to add words of your own. Of course I can’t show them here because we’re respectible after all, but they’re generally sexual profanities as well as curse words.
The last key area I want to show you is the ability to set a schedule on when the phone can be used. This is probably there to shut down usage during school time or bed time. No Pokemon Go on your lunch break at school now! Everything seems very nicely laid out and very easy to use but it does come at a cost of £5 a month. That’s not too bad, but could get pricey if you’re buying for several children. But that does mean continuous support on blocking inappropriate content online.
So, that dashboard is the reason you would give this phone to your children. Yes, it’s £200 but it’s totally worth it to keep tabs on what they are looking at though. However, at what age does this kind of service need to be used? It’s a hard one because it really boils down to how much do you trust your kids and how much are they going to be influenced by what they see online?
