Best smartphone for kids
Choosing a kid’s phone can be tricky, especially when they know so much about tech. Marie Brewis reveals your options
Long gone are the days when you can fob off a child with your second-hand phone. These days they know more about tech than most adults, and they want the best of the best just as you do. But if they don’t drop it and smash it they’ll likely leave it at school and lose it, and you don’t want to end up out of pocket. Here we round up what we think are some of the best phones for
kids, those that blend value with ease of use, strong build and, importantly, enough power to play the latest games and watch YouTube.
Price
How much you spend on a phone for your child is really up to you. While we wouldn’t advise paying flagship prices on the very best phones, we do recognise that some parents will be prepared to dig deep. We’ve focused primarily on sub-£200 budget phones in this chart, but also included some slightly more expensive mid-range phones. You can also go cheaper or more expensive.
Sometimes buying a Chinese phone can be a good way to get an attractively priced handset with higher specifications than you would otherwise get in the UK. However, if you do decide to buy a Chinese phone, unless your child is especially techy we’d advise steering clear of Xiaomi and Meizu models, which don’t preinstall Google Play and can often pop up Chinese-language notifications that may be confusing to a child.
One thing to keep in mind is that your child will be using the phone on a PAYG basis unless you’re prepared to take out a contract in their name. If you want to go down this route you’ll save money by buying the phone up front and choosing a decent SIM-only deal. A good compromise for a PAYG deal that you can keep an eye is offered by Giffgaff, which lets you purchase low-cost onemonth goody bags that offer a certain number of minutes, text and data, and no more.
You should also consider own-brand PAYG options offered by mobile operators, which are
often subsidised by the operator in order to get you on their network, which means you get more phone for your money. The Vodafone examples in our chart below are very good examples, but remember that they are locked to the Vodafone network so ensure you are happy with the operator’s PAYG terms before you buy. Such phones will usually be sold with a non-negotiable £10 top-up, which will add to the initial cost.
Design, build and specifications
You know your kid better than anyone, and when it comes to the time that they are ready to own their first phone you will likely have a good idea in your mind of what’s suitable for them. Most likely they’ll be used to playing games on a tablet before getting their own phone, and will be used to the larger screen that offers. But a large-screen phone is much easier to drop and smash on the floor than a more compact model that will fit in their pocket. The type of mid-range phones we are looking at here will typically have HD or full-HD screens under 5in in size. Also see: Best kids’ tablets 2016
Because we all know kids can be clumsy, a waterproof phone or rugged phone would be ideal. In this chart are three options: the Moto G 2015, the Sony Xperia Z5 Compact, and the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua. (Note that in Apple’s offerings only the latest iPhone 7 is waterproof.) A metal-framed phone is likely to be tougher than a plastic phone, but these do tend to be more expensive unless you opt for a Chinese phone or a UK mobile operator-subsidised model. Whichever phone you choose, we highly recommend you also purchase a case to go with it.
Adults can often overlook front-facing cameras, but for kids who love to take selfies, mess around with Snapchat and video chat they are important. Don’t even consider buying a child a phone that doesn’t have a selfie camera. Most are specified at around 5Mp, though it is possible to get much higher-rated front cameras.
You needn’t worry too much about the core specifications, since most phones these days have or are capable of everything a child requires: casual gaming, YouTube and a camera. The one thing you should look out for, though, is storage: we’d advise avoiding anything with under 16GB of internal storage (thankfully such phones are becoming much less common these days).
Look for a model with microSD support that allows you to add on more storage, and be sure to take advantage of cloud services such as Google Photos to back up multimedia online so more storage can be made available for apps and games.