Seems like trend-chasing that got behind schedule, and now they missed the fad.
Imagine if all the effort that went into this thing would have been directed towards getting Signal or WhatsApp onto a dumbphone.
Imagine if all the effort that went into this thing would have been directed towards getting Signal or WhatsApp onto a dumbphone.
Edit: Looking more at the specs and the promotional material, this starts to make a little more sense. Barbie brand the phone, in an attempt to make it trendy, so that young girls will want it. Avoid adding the social media, so not to expose the girls to an environment which we know to be bad for them. It actually makes a little sense, but sure if young teens are that into Barbie though. I'd love to see the sales numbers next year.
So these phones are mostly useless going forward. Fancy, but under powered, and unable to pull off instant messaging in a reliable enough manner.
My son used a Nokia 7880 for the past 3 years, i unsuccessfully tried switching to a nokia 800 tough from January to May this year and intended for my daughter to have her own flip Nokia phone, to no avail.
We reluctantly had them switch to secondhand smartphones over the summer...
Anyway, Signal doesn't approve use of the third-party clients. Tough luck. Dumb-phone-with-Signal has to be a collaboration with Signal-the-company.
Congratulations, you made my skin crawl.
I'm quite familiar with Signals opposition to third-party clients. I maintained my own fork of their app for about a year in order to keep SMS support. Eventually my fork got so wildly out-of-sync with upstream that I just couldn't keep up anymore.
Why /s?
Stories is exactly an example of a feature being toxic (especially, but not exclusively) for children.