Selfish Mom

Don’t Let Tiny Hands Mess Up Your Phone!

Mar 12, 2013 What's Going On

One of my favorite features on my Windows Phone is called “Kid’s Corner.” It’s brilliant, and I wish it had been around when my kids were toddlers. But we’re still getting use out of it with Fiona, and now I don’t freeze up at the thought of handing my phone over to a friend’s kid. Here’s how it works:

In the settings screen you turn on “Kid’s Corner,” and add things to the special start screen. You can add games, songs, and apps, and leave off anything you don’t want kids to have access to.

Next time you wake your phone up, you can either swipe up like usual, or swipe left to access Kid’s Corner (and of course, if you have a password on your phone, it’s not needed to get into Kid’s Corner).

If there’s one particular kid who uses your phone most often, she can customize the start screen with her name, a picture, and a custom color. And while the tiles don’t resize like on the regular start screen, kids can move the tiles around as they want.

To add things to Kid’s Corner after the initial set-up, you can go to Kid’s Corner in your settings. And to exit Kid’s Corner and get back to your part of the phone, just press the power button to sleep the phone, then again to wake it. That’s it!

This is all brilliant, because I can’t go five minutes without seeing a kid using his parent’s phone to amuse himself. And how many stories have you read about kids making thousands of dollars of purchases while playing on a phone?

Some things to keep in mind: if an app has purchasing power, you might not want to put that app in Kid’s Corner – anything the app can do on your part of the phone, it can do in Kid’s Corner. So while I trust my eight-year-old not to go on a shopping spree on the Kindle site or on Audible, I would quickly and easily remove those if I were handing the phone over to a little cousin.

Also, if you put individual songs on Kid’s Corner, each one shows up as a tile. If you want to put more than a few songs on, I’d recommend making a playlist first and putting that onto Kid’s Corner instead.

UPDATE: I don’t normally update posts in this way, but I thought that this was too cool not to add. I just found out that if you launch Pandora from Kid’s Corner, it automatically filters out explicit content. This is a fantastic feature, and I hope that more apps add this kind of Kid’s Corner-only functionality.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing that Kid’s Corner can do about the germs that kids leave on your phone. Still waiting for an app for that. :-D

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 8. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

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Tags: Windows Phone 8