An Android phone designed for kids.   I’m Fred Fishkin with technology BootCamp, a report on gadgets and gear.   Techno Source, the maker of the Kurio line of tablets for kids, is getting into smartphones.  Division Head Eric Levin says the company has taken what it has learned with tablets featuring parental controls and is using that to create a phone that both kids and parents will like…

“We’ve gone a step further with really a new suite of parental controls and tools that help deal with things that phones bring into the mix.  So, for example, contact management becomes a big issue, especially with younger kids.  You can, as a parent, decide which contacts they can actually receive calls from, texts from, etcetera.  And that can be a big issue.  I’ll tell you, my current 12 year old, when she first got a phone, started getting some random texts from somebody, it was a wrong number, but it contained some pretty inappropriate stuff and all that can kind of be blocked out by the contact controls.”

The Kurio phone is slated to arrive late this spring.   You can find us at BootCamp.com.   I’m Fred Fishkin.