Woah, I should get Mom a Samsung Fascinate (Phones for the older folks?)

by Jon · 2011-07-12

Nexus S
CC-BY-SA-3.0 Luca Volpi

No, I don’t actually have any plans to get my mother a Samsung phone. For those living under a rock (or don’t have cable), that’s the recent tag line from a Verizon commercial. It’s a rather amusing commercial about a dude deciding that he should get his Mom a smart phone so he can send her pictures of his child… a child which doesn’t currently exist… but if it did he would name it Brian. A little odd, though amusing. It has set me to pondering about my own Mother’s need for a new phone and specifically how there are no good phones for the older generation.

Really, my mother does need a new phone. Her current phone is old enough that it says Cingular on it. AT&T re-branded themselves in 2006, seriously dating that phone. Her battery is dying and it’s really starting to wear out in general. I know she needs to upgrade, but to what?

Take a quick look at the phones Verizon currently offers and you’ll find that they only have two types, i.e. “feature phones” and “smart phones”. Granted they’ve got a few “feature phones” that look fairly stripped down, but they’re still a long way from a simple device. I thought a smart phone (more specifically an Android) could work for her if there was some sort of “simple” interface – but so far I can’t find one.

My assumption is that there would be a fair market for cell phones that target the older generation. The easiest way to do this, without special hardware, is an interface overhaul for Android. The interface would need to provide: Simple phone dialing with EASY access to a simple contact list. Simple access to text messages. Simple access to the camera. Most importantly, it would need to do everything with a (variably) LARGE print. If I had the skill in modding Android, I would do this myself.

So, does anyone out there have any recommendations for my mom’s new phone? Something easy to use with decently large print? Or maybe you’ve found an interface for Android that would work. Please, let me know in the comments below.

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Quentin says:

2012-05-16 at 00:16

Hi Jon,

Just stumbled across this looking for large print Android options myself. Did you end up finding a replacement phone for your mother?

The best Android option I’ve come across so far is “BIG Launcher”, a home screen replacement for Android which works fairly well:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=name.kunes.android.launcher.activity&hl=en

It’s only a dollar and change and there is a free version too so you can try it out.

I was also looking an another app called “BigDialer” which gives a simpler, larger, easier to see phone dialer than the standard (the Big Launcher just points to the standard phone dialer). – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=at.abraxas.bigdialer&hl=en

That one is also a couple dollars.

Regards

Quentin.

- Jon says:
  
  2012-05-16 at 14:31
  
  My mother ended up with an iPhone. The icon’s are OK and she can turn up the font size for most apps.
  
  Otherwise, the app looks nifty.
  
Katherine says:

2011-08-23 at 20:16

There’s a phone specifically marketed for senior citizens called the Jitterbug. I met a woman on an airplane who raved about hers.

- Jon says:
  
  2011-08-24 at 10:15
  
  Yea. I’ve actually seen that one. It just seems so simplistic. I mean, yes, you want simple, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a camera and a few extra’s like that. I guess I just don’t know anything about the jitterbug other than the two pictures of it they have on their site.