What Apple Didn’t Know?
At least, I don’t think they knew. And if they did, they might have made a very simple feature change for the iPhone and iPod touch; a way to disable the ‘home’ button while still running an application. Why is this important? Ask any parent. My wife and I have had iPhones for two years now and while we are sans crumb snatchers, our nieces and nephews (ages 0+) have been very quick on the uptake. That’s right, children under the age of one have figured out how to navigate pictures and play with applications. The second we walk in the door for a visit, the kids let us know what we’re good for. How could any good aunt or uncle resist?
Sabrina, a first grade teacher and literacy specialist, had the bright idea to develop learning literacy applications for the 0-5 year old market. One of the key feature requirements would be to lock the home button while providing a way for a parent to undo the lock. However, it’s not possible without jail breaking the iPhone first. As the horror stories mount of children deleting emails, contacts, photos, etc. I expect changes. There are physical devices to prevent baby tampering but these are probably purchased after something bad has already happened and lacks elegance.
Baby driven applications on doing very well in the iTunes store. This entire market of non-phone users and non-spenders will account for a significant piece of the revenue pie. I don’t recall seeing anything about babies and toddlers mentioned in the iPhone launch. Maybe this was on purpose, but maybe not.
I am speaking at an event in Northern Virginia next week and have decided to focus on this topic. And I need your help. Send me your testimonials, horror stories, pictures of kids using your iPhone, etc. and I would be most grateful.
Thanks!
Pete
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
I just found a blog post about this topic with several great testimonials. http://blogs.tampabay.com/moms/2009/04/if-you-give-a-toddler-an-iphone-.html
I am constantly finding new pictures set as my wall paper because my 2 and 4 year old get a hold of my iphone and go straight to pictures and start flipping through them. Once on a picture it’s easy to email them, which they have done, or set a new wall paper image. That’s one thing about the iphone that they probably didn’t think about: when its so easy to do things or make changes a lot of things can be done by accident by children randomly clicking around.
I have found my battery run down because they start music playing and then leave it going until I find the iphone hours later.