Tin Can is a stupid phone for kids. Can someone teach them how to use it?

Chet Kittleson, 38 years old He is the co-founder of Tin Can and a father of three children, 10, 8 and 5. I suspect he wouldn’t much like my description of the product’s function as “spying” (watching kids is part of a parent’s job) or the product itself as a “toy.” He thinks of it, instead, as an aid: a way for kids to talk to grandma or make plans with friends and be “part of the same world that adults are part of.” When he was a kid, he says, landline was “the most successful social network ever.” Every house had one. Then came cell phones and smartphones. Direct lines to the Internet. “Somewhere along the way, we decided the landline was obsolete,” Kittleson says. “In doing so, we ignored a group that was the main beneficiary: children.”

I’m talking to him via Zoom one afternoon from my home in Los Angeles and his office in Seattle. When I told him that Amos and Clara had called me more than twenty times, he didn’t seem particularly surprised. At first there is a flurry of activity, and then over the course of a few weeks, the children mature, he says. “They say, ‘Oh, well, I see I can do important things this way,’” he says.

Kittleson, who believes most tin can users are between the ages of 5 and 13, says he wants to help create a “better childhood” or, as he puts it, “bring back a sense of independence and confidence to kids.” (Mike Dubow, a partner at Greylock Ventures, who led a round that invested $12 million in the company in October, says something similar.) One parent, describing using his child’s Tin Can on the books It “felt like the good old days”.

Amos and Clara weren’t the only ones who received the gift of gab during the holidays. In late December, frustrated parents filled out the company’s feedback forms and posted on Reddit that their tin cans weren’t working. Although Tin Can engineers were expecting a surge in usage over the holidays, the hundred-fold increase in call volume caught them by surprise.

When I asked Kittelson about the holiday crisis, he winced. “Christmas was stressful,” he admits. (A message on Tin Can’s home page says: “We’re investigating an issue affecting the network.”) Future shipments of the product will be staggered, he says.

The product is far from perfect: there may be echoes, unstable sound quality, and long pauses. The buttons on the device are difficult to press, which can be a challenge for small fingers like Amos’. His mother Rebecca sometimes has to help him make calls. “It takes a little bit of independence,” she says.

my first phone, Like other kids of my generation, mine was a mustard-yellow piece of hard plastic that sat on a mottled brown linoleum table adjacent to the kitchen. It held a special place in my imagination – something full of potential – but like most phones of the time, it was shared within a family and perhaps overheard or monitored. It’s also attached to the wall, making it difficult to multitask or move around while on a call. In fact, Kittelson says one of Tin Kahn’s inspirations was his frustration when he called his mother on her cell phone. She was, he says, “the worst”: the kind of person who runs around the house on a call, doing laundry or whatever. It’s hard to hear. Easily distracted.