Chances are you haven't heard of Gabb, a virtual carrier that uses Verizon's network. It sells special service plans with talk and text, but no internet. Talk and text costs $19.99 per month; adding picture messages and group texting costs an extra $5. The $99.99 Gabb Z2, a modified ZTE smartphone, offers up calling, texting, and basic music playback without any internet, gaming, or social media features, making it ideal for a basic connectivity phone for kids. That is, it's ideal in a world where kids leave the house and aren't entirely reliant on the internet for their social lives, which means, not 2020. Still, it's worth considering for keeping your kids offline at least some of the time.

Design

The Z2 is a basic smartphone running a locked-down version of Android 10. It measures 5.5 by 2.8 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and has a 5.45-inch, 720p LCD on the front. The display isn't stunningly bright, in part because the plastic screen cover definitely reduces the brightness a bit.

On the back, there's an 8-megapixel camera and a fingerprint scanner. The back panel and battery are removable. It isn't waterproof, but as a fully plastic phone, it's pretty resilient when dropped.

Apps and Features

The gimmick here is that the Gabb Z2 only has preloaded apps. There's a calculator, calendar, camera, clock, contact book, file manager, FM radio, music player, video player, and voice recorder. That's it. There's no web browser and you can't add more apps. Just dropping APK files onto the phone doesn't do anything because there's no APK installer.

There's a necessary caveat here: I'm sure that if you have an unusually geeky teen, there's almost certainly some way to hack the Gabb Z2 to get a web browser or Android apps onto it. I can't figure it out myself, but it probably involves the Android Developer Tools on a PC. This is just to say that technology is no replacement for parenting. There has to be some level of trust.

The Z2 uses a Mediatek MT6761 processor, which is fine for the limited level of functionality the phone provides. It felt sprightly in daily use, although sometimes it took an annoying two or three swipes to unlock the home screen. With the very limited OS, I couldn't run any benchmarking apps.

ZTE says the phone gets about sixteen hours of talk time and two weeks of standby time, which is impressive. In my three days of testing, I didn't have to charge it—that's what happens when a phone isn't running background data tasks all the time.

Connectivity and call quality are unremarkable. The Z2 connects to the Verizon LTE network or to 2.4GHz/5GHz Wi-Fi, and uses voice-over-LTE and Wi-Fi calling. Data speeds aren't an issue, because none of the apps use data. There's a speakerphone, of course, as well as support for both Bluetooth and 3.5mm headsets.

The contact and calendar apps are a miss. They're the standard Android contact book and calendar apps, but because the phone is unmoored from Google accounts, there's no way to sync them with anything. Gabb would do well to have a web portal where parents can upload contact lists and sync calendars with school activities. You can block calls from unidentified numbers, but I don't see a parent-protected way to do a pure calling whitelist, which should be essential on a kids' phone.

Gabb lacks server-side parental controls, which feels like another lost opportunity. While the carrier says GPS tracking is coming in October, there's no way to remotely monitor or restrict a Gabb phone's text messages, for instance. My review unit kept getting spam texts that I couldn't block, and it would have been great to be able to see those from a console. I'd also really like to be able to restrict texting after a certain time of night, so the phone can become a pure music player.

For multimedia, there are music and video apps that play local files out of the 23GB of available storage or from a microSD card, as well as an FM radio that works with wired headphones. I uploaded a bunch of MP3 and AAC files to the phone from my PC and it sorted and played them well. Still though, I notice that a lot of music my daughter wants to listen to isn't available as MP3s, necessarily—it's weird video game fan songs she finds on YouTube. It would be great to have a way for kids to listen to streaming music without being exposed to streaming videos.

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The 8-megapixel main camera and 5-megapixel front camera, with 1080p video recording, are surprisingly solid for a $99 phone. In good light, the main camera takes sharp, well-defined photos with rich colors and focuses properly on both near and far locations. This is a $99 phone, though, so don't expect great low-light performance or rich HDR colors. In a photo with a dark foreground and a bright background, the phone prefers the foreground and blows out the background. On this hardware, that's the smart choice.

If you don't have the picture messaging plan, the only way to get your photos off the phone is with a USB cable. Otherwise, you can send them by MMS, but of course those will get compressed.

Conclusions

In 2020, kids' needs are different than they ever were before. I've seen this as a parent. My daughter's social life, once dominated by visiting friends, is now Discord, Google Meet, and Zoom. (FaceTime is important for many people as well, but we aren't an Apple family.) With online work and online schooling, we don't want to restrict internet access; we want as many backup service plans and devices as possible in case one goes down.

But I get a lot of emails from parents who want an internet-free, parentally controlled phone for their children. With other phones for kids, you can ask your wireless carrier for a "data block" to prevent LTE access, but there's still Wi-Fi to worry about.

The Gabb Z2 gets most of the way there. It's internet-free, and GPS tracking is coming, although I'd like to see more in the way of calling and texting monitoring and controls. Unfortunately, there's relatively little use for a phone like this during our pandemic year, but that doesn't mean it isn't good at what it does.