New Live Show

The smart phone has become an integral part of today's family life. Famigo has developed an easy, safe, and helpful app management tool for your Android called, Sandbox.

There are thousands of applications available that have options for in-game purchases and chargeable downloads. Sandbox imports apps already on your phone into a safe kid friendly space. Once inside the Sandbox, children cannot make in-game purchases or send out texts or make inadvertent phone calls to your contacts list, nor can they download other items. You can allow your child to use their apps without fear of them wreaking havoc on your phone setup or running up the phone bill.

The Sandbox does not only place apps in a kid-friendly playspace. At Famigo.com, apps are reviewed and rated. Apps are filtered from your phone into the Sandbox based upon Famigo.com approval, and what other Sandbox users have included in their Sandbox. Apps are rated and categorized by by many factors including, age group, educational, family-friendly games, books for kids, tablet friendly, and even if they're good for road trips.

Here at DadLabs, we understand that technology is reaching further and further into family life. Keeping kids safe, and parents sane is important and we applaud Famigo for helping to do both.

Episode 830 is sponsored by BabyBjorn.

iMessage is the new messaging service for IOS5. Daddy Clay discusses the various parental controls available for the iPhone. Telematics from AT&T and the iPhone itself allow for text limits, voice limits, web access, including YouTube, and email among others. These work great in combination... until you add iMessage to the mix. Because iMessage is a wireless and IOS5 operating system based application, it essentially bypasses AT&T parental controls. iMessage is also not in the restrictions panel, so while you can turn it off, it is not pass coded. Your child can simply turn it back on. If that wasn't bad enough, iMessage conversations happen on all of your shared devices at the same time. So, your iMessage chat on your iPhone, will show up on the iPad your child is using. (And their conversations will also appear on your device.) Daddy Clay illustrates a real life mishap with iMessage communications, and the difficulty of exerting control over this new service, as well as the simple solution, that has to come from Apple.

Episode #841 is brought to you by BabyBjorn.