Families with kids

Kids want to call grandma and their friends. You don’t want to hand them a smartphone. Open Lounge Phone is a real phone on the kitchen counter or the bedroom desk: twelve keys, a handset, a small status screen and nothing else. No browser, no feeds, no strangers.

What it does

• Only the people you approve. A kid’s phone can call, and be called by, exactly the people a guardian puts on its list, in each direction. It has no address of its own, so nobody can knock on it.
• One key per person. Grandma on 2, a best friend on 3. Names show on the screen; print labels for the keycaps if you like.
• Quiet hours. School nights and school hours: the phone doesn’t ring, callers leave a voicemail instead, and the screen says when quiet hours end. Parents can still ring through.
• Voicemail with transcripts. Missed calls go to the guardians’ inbox, and the phone shows who called.
• Friends on other servers. Another family on their own server, or on the free hub, can be on the list through your connections.

It grows with them

Kids’ phones on the market are closed boxes with a fixed feature list. This one is open: the board, the firmware and the server are all published, so a curious kid can learn how a phone works, swap keycaps, print a new case and, later, change the code. Through all of it the phone’s rules stay with the guardians: who it calls and when it rings. The rules live on the server, not in the phone, so changed firmware on the phone still reaches only the people you approved there. Changing what a phone is for means removing it, which wipes it, and pairing it again.

Start

1. Try it today on an old tablet or phone: Getting started.
2. Pair the phone as a Kids phone.
3. Add family and set quiet hours.
4. Set up voicemail and greetings, and maybe a family party line.

Want the real thing on the counter? Build the hardware (an early prototype today; assembled boards are coming).