United Kingdom

4039 readers

248 users here now

General community for news/discussion in the UK.

Less serious posts should go in [email protected] or [email protected]
More serious politics should go in [email protected].

Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Only 3% of UK 12-year-olds don’t have a smartphone. Here is how four of them feel about it (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 12 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

top 4 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Honestly a big part of this is that the "dumb" phones are just as, if not more, expensive than a used or low end smartphone.

My daughter did use a dumb phone for a while, but then they started shutting down 2G and some 3G masts in the area and it was causing problems. There are some newer dumb phones that can use 4G, but given the prices and half of them still using micro usb for some damn reason (I'm a big fan of just carrying around one charger) it made more sense for me to give her an old smartphone and lock it down a little.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

I'm a big fan of just carrying around one charger

Off topic, but I bought a handful of magnetic cables and a few different ends to match our devices, and now one cable works for charging everything.

It has the downside of not letting you connect the device to a computer, but because they're magnetic, they're breakaway cables. My kid has walked away with their tablet after forgetting to unplug it, and nothing bad happens 👍

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Is there some kind of parental software that can lock down phones like what happens on corporate phones? Like where you can control which apps are installed etc? That sounds like the best approach: just give them a phone with WhatsApp, phone and SMS. Any refurbished phone from the last 10 years would work for that (lack of Android security updates might be an issue though)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

Family Link works okay for Android... It is google first party. Wish I could find something that worked for multiple platforms in the same app, but also that would probably be its own nightmare.