The Simple Smart Phone for Seniors: Neither Smart nor Simple Enough
Anyone who has teenagers knows that once they get a smartphone in their hands, it’s hard to pry it away from them. With your aging parents, though, the opposite is often true. They don’t even want to pick one up.
(Thinkstock)
Can you blame them? Most phones just aren’t designed for people born in the middle of the last century. The screens are too hard to read, the buttons difficult to manipulate, the benefits obscure, and the overall experience too new.
Read: Cool Tech Tools for Your Aging Parents
But there are a growing number of smartphones designed to appeal directly to the elder generation. I recently got my hands on one, the Simple Smart Phone. This is a Samsung Galaxy S3, modified with software designed by an Israeli company called Easy to Connect (e2c). They’re doing business in the U.S. as Simple Smart Phone.
I looked at a preproduction version of the phone, which is scheduled to hit the U.S. market in May. The handset will be free; access to emergency services will cost $30 a month, with unlimited data plans starting at $50.
Is it simple? Mostly. Smart? Sometimes. But this beta phone is far from fully baked, and some of the design decisions are just plain weird.
We like big buttons (and we cannot lie)
The Simple Smart Phone is chock-full of senior-friendly features, starting with the device’s home page. Instead of a sea of hard-to-see Android icons, you get the following menu, featuring five buttons with extra-large type.
(Simple Smart Phone)
The basic smartphone functions — calling, texting, and viewing pictures — are all easily accessible on the top menu. Select More… to reach features like the Galaxy’s camera, a flashlight, Facebook, phone settings, and a range of news articles from the New York Times. There’s even a button labeled Selfie that automatically launches the front-facing camera.
The other standard Android and Samsung apps are hiding under the Apps menu. This is where you’ll find Gmail, YouTube, the Play Store, Google Maps, a media player, Web browser, and Samsung’s custom applications. By burying these apps, though, Simple Smart Phone is clearly assuming most seniors won’t want to bother with them. That’s an assumption I would question.
(Simple Smart Phone)
Other geezer-friendly features include a haptic keyboard with extra large keys and a time delay. By default, you have to hold your finger on a button or a key for 1.5 seconds — until it vibrates — before it registers your keystroke. This is designed to help people who end up touching the wrong letters or buttons because their hands shake too much. If you don’t have this problem, you will find this feature extremely annoying. Fortunately, you can go into the Android settings and select a different keyboard.
When you make a call, the phone reads the numbers out loud as you punch them in, or it lets you dial by voice. The messaging app features super-large type for names and texts, and it lets you choose from a series of canned responses like “I am fine,” “Please call,” or “I am on my way,” as well as typing. These are all good, helpful features.
A cry for help
Perhaps the biggest selling points for seniors (or their kids) are the phone’s easy access to emergency services and live tech support. Pressing the Help button brings up these two big buttons:
(Simple Smart Phone)
The SOS button on top connects to a live human who can determine if a family member or emergency responders need to be dispatched. Seniors can also call the SOS service by holding down a shortcut button plugged into the phone’s headphone jack for two seconds. Family members can get a text message whenever the senior issues an SOS.
The bottom button brings you to customer service and tech support. (A VIP service will be available later this year.) I made a couple of calls to both numbers and found the technicians polite and responsive, if perhaps a little surprised to be hearing from someone in the U.S.
(Google Play Store)
A companion Android app, called K.I.T. (Keep In Touch), will let you monitor your senior’s phone remotely, track its location, set up alerts for when they enter or leave a specific geographic area, and force the phone to answer when you call and turn on the speakerphone. That app was not yet working as this article was being prepared.
Bad Grandpa
And that was not the only thing that didn’t work. This was very much a beta version of the phone. For one thing, there are misspellings and grammatical errors in the on-screen menus. Some apps, like Waze and Facebook, wouldn’t load at all. Sometimes tapping inside a text entry window brought up the onscreen keyboard, and sometimes it didn’t.
(Photo: Dan Tynan/Yahoo Tech)
But most of the phone’s problems are due to screwy design decisions. The phone’s back button — the curved back arrow that lights up when you touch the lower right side of the Galaxy’s case — doesn’t work inside the phone’s custom menus. That means if you go three or four levels deep into the menu (for instance, to launch the browser), you can only back out of it by pressing the Home button and starting over again from the top-level menu. (Once you’re inside the standard Android and Samsung apps, the back button works again.)
You can change most of the default settings on the phone, but you’ll have to work harder than usual to find them. Simple Smart Phone goes to considerable trouble to hide the phone’s advanced settings. You have to go four levels deep and tap all four corners of the screen in clockwise order to get to where you can update contacts, select ringtones, set up safety zones, and the like. Presumably, this is to avoid having seniors accidentally change a setting and bollix their phones. Still, it feels a little over the top.
A Simple Smart Phone spokesperson says the company plans to clean up the errors and swat all the bugs before it goes on sale in May.
Smart and final
Simple Smart Phone gets a lot of things right, but it doesn’t get you all the way home. And it’s hardly your only smartphone option for seniors. Great Call’s Touch3 is another Samsung Android phone with a similarly simplified interface and access to emergency services; the phone costs $150, with voice and data plans ranging from $20 to $120 a month.
The real challenge, though, is convincing your parents they need a mobile device like the Simple Smart Phone. According to Andrew Parker, director of communications for the seniors-oriented support site ITOK.net, three quarters of its customers don’t see any reason to own a smartphone. Of the ones that do, most want an iPhone, says Parker. In that, at least, they are just like their teenage grandchildren.
Reach out and touch Dan Tynan at ModFamily1@yahoo.com.
