This adorable phone is designed to get kids off screens and into the world

Дата публикации: 30-09-2026 16:00:00

Sam Terris spent his childhood roaming the woods around Walden Pond. Growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, he and his friends would spend hours outdoors, away from their parents. “We were really bored kids, so we had to invent games and activities to keep ourselves stimulated,” he says. “I think that was a really important part of development in my generation.”
Terris, a serial entrepreneur who cofounded the plant-based nugget brand Nuggs, recently had a baby. He’s spent much of the last few years trying to figure out how to give his son a similar childhood. It’s not that easy, given than kids now spend very little time on their own, while also having access to the open internet. A 2025 Harris Poll of 500 kids aged 8 to 12 found that 62% had never walked or biked anywhere without an adult. Meanwhile, kids are spending more time on screens than ever. This is all culminating in a moment where parents are becoming increasingly wary of the impact that technology has on their children. (Last month, Meta agreed to pay up to $17 billion to settle claims from 51 states that argued it deliberately made its apps addictive to kids.)
[Photo: Freckle]
Terris doesn’t think technology is inherently bad for children. The problem is that social media and smartphones have been deliberately designed to addict us. But what if we could design technology that helps kids develop independence, build relationships, and stay safe?
Today, he’s launching a new device designed to do this. Freckle is a $199 phone for kids aged 7 to 13, with a $25-a-month wireless plan. It has no web browser, app store, social media, or YouTube. Kids can call and text only the contacts their parents approve. Equipped with tracking, Freckle allows parents to follow their child on a map, or they can set up “safe zones” that send an alert if the child leaves them. “You could choose to track their every movement,” Terris says, “but you could also just trust the product to alert you.”
Freckle, which received investment from Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, is available for preorder now and ships in December.
[Photo: Freckle]
A Phone Kids Enjoy Using
While Freckle is designed to soothe parents’ anxieties, it’s also made for kids to enjoy. The hardware is soft, colorful, and covered in tactile buttons. It is built around a small square touchscreen.
Freckle has a “Discovery Camera” that identifies bugs, birds, and plants and adds them to a digital sticker book. “It sort of feels like Pokémon Go, but for real life,” Terris says.
Parents can send “quests,” such as finding five kinds of bugs at the park or photographing three Impressionist paintings at a museum. When two kids tap their Freckles together, they unlock a walkie-talkie mode. The phone also has a tap-to-pay wallet that parents can load with their pocket money, in case they want to use it on an ice cream run.
Terris says the name is meant to conjure being outdoors in the sunlight, and coming home to find that the time outdoors has left a trace on your skin. “There’s this connotation of technology being indoors and isolating,” he says. “But if it’s carefully designed, it could be a really good facilitator of outdoor experience, and prosocial.”
[Photo: Freckle]
What Does NonAddictive Tech Look Like?
In designing this device, Terris had to wrestle with the difficult question of how to make a device that kids love without making one that is so engaging and addictive they can’t put it down.
It’s a problem that a growing number of companies in kids’ tech are trying to solve. Tonies recently teamed up with Hasbro to turn board games like Monopoly and Guess Who? into audio games that play on the screen-free Toniebox. And Skylight’s Buddy, a small device that helps kids get through their daily routines, has deliberately simple graphics built to hold a child’s attention just long enough to finish a task, and no longer.
For Terris, one guiding principle is that the device should help the child engage with the world beyond it. “We want it to always invite in a third party, whether that’s another object, another person, your environment,” he says. “It’s never a portal to a digital realm.”
[Photo: Freckle]
Freckle is part of a growing wave of phones for children. Stripped-down smartphones like Gabb, Pinwheel, and Troomi leave out social media, web browsers, and app stores. The Bark Phone is a Samsung Galaxy that scans kids’ messages for red flags and turns on more features as they get older. For younger kids who spend most of their time at home, there are landline-style phones like Tin Can and Pinwheel Home, which connect only to contacts that parents have approved. It’s still unclear which of these will catch on. Many parents end up choosing the iPhone because everyone already has one.
Terris wants to reach families before their kids get a smartphone. He admits that most kids will eventually move on to an iPhone. He hopes Freckle can prepare them for it, so that a 13-year-old can use that technology responsibly. He compares the approach to European parents who let their children have a little wine with meals. “This is like a little bit of wine at dinner,” he says.

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