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One thing that parents have to worry about these days is the amount of time their child spends talking on their cell phone and texting. Kids love to talk and text which means their parents tend to get hefty bills at the end of the month. AT&T has created a new service that will allow parents to limit how much time their child can spend on the phone.
The service which is call Smart Limits for Wireless is pretty cool as it lets the parent restrict how much time their child uses the phone for talking and texting their friends, but at the same time they can make calls to their parents and a number of “allowed numbers” including 911.
Until this came along, there was really no good way to keep your kids from making phone calls when they are grounded without taking the phone away from them. This was never a great option because then they no longer have the phone for emergencies and the parent can’t get ahold of them. The service works with any existing (non-TDMA) phone and will cost $4.99 per month, per phone.
AT&T lets parents limit cell use [via tgdaily]
I personally think that if they offered it for free that they could get alot of new sign-ups. But I guess now-a-days everything is for a cost…
Wait a minute, I have to pay a price to dumb down a phone. I like how they threw in the word “smart” in the title. As cingular I could call them and say remove text messaging or browsing internet from a phone. I wonder if I can do that now? Hmmmmmmm
So not only has call quality gone down the tubes in my area, but I pay more for less. Please go away AT&T you money grubbers…..
I think you’re missing the point of the service. Some parents like to tell their kids “you can only talk x minutes per month” and AT&T allows them to do that. Also, if they want to ground their kids from the phone, they can do that without physically taking the phone away from them, thus giving the kid a means to contact them in case of an emergency.
I am finding out that if a caller blocks their number from being seen this ATT feature will still let the call go through. One would think with all the technology ATT has it would be able to still block this type of call as long as it is on the blocked number list.
Without these types of calls being blocked it won’t be long before it catches on how to get around this costly ATT feature.
From ATT site:
Instructions
Add numbers you do not want this phone to be able to call or text or vice versa, regardless of other limits or restrictions. We’re sorry, but this Blocked Numbers feature cannot currently be used to block 411 or international dialed numbers. (A maximum of 15 numbers can be blocked.)
Note: Blocked Numbers do not prevent the use of instant messaging or picture/video messaging. AT&T must receive the inbound Caller ID phone number to recognize it as a Blocked Number.