While Firefly and i-Care and any number of other companies march ahead with their cell phones for toddlers without a worry care in the world beyond "How soon will it be before Jamie Foxx's kid is seen using it in Us Weekly?", in France, the BabyMo phone sparked an instant controversy and got yanked within a couple days of being introduced last year.
Supposedly, retail giants Carrefour and BHV--the Wal-Mart and Circuit City of France, respectively--were reacting to consumer groups' outrage over the unresearched safety threats posed by cell phone antennas: Kids' ¬´boˆÆte [crˆ¢nienne] n'est pas encore complˆ®tement formˆ©e, leur systˆ®me nerveux pas complˆ®tement dˆ©veloppˆ©, et les radiations pˆ©nˆ®trent plus loin dans leur cerveau¬ª. [Hint: boˆÆte=skull and cerveau=brain, I think you can figure the rest out.]
For their part, the phone's distributor says that as long as you use it as instructed--no more than 6 minutes/day, with an earpiece, don't sleep with it--there should be no risk at all. [6 minutes?? I laugh in your general direction.]
So it's odd that no one seems to give a tinker's damn about potential cell phone health hazards in this country. Instead, the potential spectre of BabyMo's is being used to fan the flames of opposition to gay adoption. Go figure.
Un tˆ©lˆ©phone mobile pour enfants indˆ©sirable dans la grande distribution [zdnet.fr]
via "Kids: High Tech's Fussy New Customers," a CeBIT report [physorg via robotwisdom]
Previous cell phones for kids
