It looks like a stopwatch, but it's a cell phone for kids. Enfora's TicTalk joins (and beats) the smaller Firefly in the realm of parentally controlled phones for preteens. The TicTalk isn't perfect, but kids will like it better than the Firefly.

The TicTalk looks nothing like a phone: It's a tough plastic oval with a grayscale screen on the front and a loop near the top that is both a means for clipping it to a jacket or backpack and an antenna, which gives it better reception than the Firefly. It's lightweight and tough; we kicked it, dropped it, and batted it around, and it still worked fine. Battery life was excellent: We got 10 hours 44 minutes of talk time, and we'd expect at least a week of standby.

There's no keypad on this gadget. Instead, everything is controlled by a rocker wheel and two buttons. The buttons aren't labeled and change functionality in different applications, which can be frustrating. For instance, it's not entirely clear which button (the upper left) you press to turn the darn thing on.

Like the Firefly, and unlike "normal" cell phones, the TicTalk can only call or receive calls from a parentally approved list of callers (a good thing, because calls are billed at 25 cents a minute). Kids scroll through the phone book using the rocker wheel. The TicTalk allows 12 "anytime" callers (parents, siblings, emergency contacts) and 10 "reward" callers (for fun, such as friends). Parents set the lists through a Web page and can restrict "reward" calls to certain times of day or only allow them for a certain number of minutes each day.

Unlike the Firefly, the TicTalk addresses kids' love of media and games. Kids can record up to five of their own ringtones (but they can't download ringtones), and the gadget comes with five educational games from LeapFrog, with speech and sampled sounds: one spelling game, two math games, a trivia game, and Hangman. The games have several levels, and parents can set the difficulty and monitor kids' progress from a Web page. Enfora told us that parents will be able to download more games in the future.

Parental controls and monitoring are the TicTalk's strengths. Parents can set who their child can make calls to, turn various phone features on or off, disable the ringer (or the whole phone) during the school day, add to the phone's to-do list, and send one-way text messages (which kids can reply to using multiple-choice answers). This is far beyond the parental controls available on any normal cell phone, even the Firefly. We'd still like to have seen a detailed list of who our child was calling for how long on the TicTalk page, but for that you have to go to your wireless carrier.

As with the Firefly, the TicTalk's Achilles' heel is its lackluster audio quality. The phone is a bit awkward to hold up to your head and the sound quality isn't great, with an audible hiss in the handset. It's still acceptable, though, especially for the brief calls younger kids are likely to be making.

Enfora says the TicTalk will cost $99.99 for the phone, a battery charger, USB charging cable, and a lanyard. You can purchase prepaid cellular minutes on the Cingular network for $0.25/minute through the TicTalk Web site. This is a little high but not unreasonable for the low-use, mostly emergencies type of service most parents want.

Trustworthy kids older than 10 would probably be happier with a youth-oriented "adult" phone like the Nokia 3205 or Nokia 3220. But the TicTalk is the best phone we've seen so far for the preteen set, especially for kids who can't be trusted with the responsibility of a more expensive full-fledged phone.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 10 hours 44 minutes

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