On Friday, Bell Mobility and Solo announced a feature that allows parents to block access to certain websites from their kids mobile devices. The content access control lets parents limit access to Internet sites that might be inappropriate for their children.
According to Adel Bazerghi, Senior Vice President of Products for Bell Mobility:
As use of the Internet on mobile phones grows, fuelled by the popularity of smartphones and the fast access speeds delivered by 3G networks, our clients have asked for tools to help them manage access. Bell Parental Control offers them content filtering capability on mobile phones for the first time in Canada.
The feature costs $5 per month.
It would be interesting to see if Bell or other service providers would support parents downloading 3rd party software to perform a similar function on the handsets.
I wonder about adding other parental controls to limit kids calling to a set list of numbers, perhaps even setting up limited call lists during peak hours. What about parental controls on the number of times users can incur premium text message charges – protecting against surprise charges for TV voting shows? Or bundling location tracking capabilities?
Deliver a complete phone-use management tool and you might have something that more parents will be happier to buy.