DokiWatch is a smartwatch for kids — designed to allow parents to locate and communicate with children aged six and up — without having to supply and acquaint them with the intricacies of smartphones.
It’s not that kids born into this digital age aren’t comfortable with smartphones. Rather, this provides a tool for direct communication and tracking, for a parent’s peace of mind instead of a child’s entertainment.
The dokiWatch has a full-colour, 1.22 inch touch screen, incorporated into a bright and chunky plastic watch strap. The plastic is soft, comfortable and smooth. It is quite bulky though, so might look a bit outsized on little arms. But they’ve packed in quite a few features, a sim card slot, and a battery that’s good for 36 hours’ use, and longer on standby.
Each dokiWatch is managed via an app on the parent’s smartphone. This app lets you communicate directly with your kids — via voice message, emojis, voice calls, and even video calls. It lets you receive alerts, calls and messages from them; add contacts for approved "friends" and "family" contact lists; and even remotely deactivates the watch, during class time for example.
The device also has Bluetooth pairing so kids can add other dokiWatches, letting them communicate with friends who also have one. You get notifications of these adds, to keep you in the loop.
There’s just three physical buttons on the device. The power button that also wakes up the touchscreen, a back button, and an SOS button.
The latter sends an alarm signal to a parent’s phone, activates continuous geo-tracking, and auto-records a minute of audio. The thinking is great, and could be essential in a real emergency, but I suspect it will invite false alarms driven by curiosity. At least you have to hold down the SOS button for a few seconds, which should reduce the number of alarms from knocks and bumps. My only concern is that location data during the review wasn’t perfectly accurate.
The dokiWatch comes with a basic fitness tracker and "dokiPet" which is like a Tamagotchi for the next generation. The dokiWatch is distributed locally by Quantifi (quantifi.co.za) and the recommended retail price is R2,999.
DokiWatch
Cool factor ****
Usability *****
Value for money ***