Product Review: How I Struggled to Activate My Kids Firefly Mobile Phone

My tween aged daughter has been wanting a cell phone; the Firefly Mobile Phone for Mobile kids seemed like a terrific solution.

What impressed me was that it was supposedly kid friendly and easy to use with only 5 touch pads. It also allowed parents to preprogram up to 22 numbers, with handy one-punch speed dial buttons to call either Mom, Dad, or 9-1-1. Parents could also screen incoming calls. The air time cost is expensive at 25¢ a minute, but I like the ability of being able to preload minutes as we needed them instead of using a monthly carrier. Since the reason for our tween to even have a cell phone was for emergencies, Firefly seemed like a good choice.

We ordered our Firefly phone as a premium through a shopping site. When it arrived, the first thing we noticed was that it was an extremely small phone, less than 3.5 inches in length. It was placed on the charger overnight, and the following morning, I called the activation number. The recorded message gave us our phone number and indicated that we had 30 free minutes.

It then came time to preprogram the phone. At first glance, the instructions seemed very straight forward, but as I began scrolling through the options, the whole set up seemed very counterintuitive. The actual programming happens with only 3 keys. It took about an hour to figure out how to program the "Mom" and "Dad" keys and to add 4 other phone numbers. My choices kept bringing me back to resetting the Pin number. I went to the web site in hopes of finding some better instructions. What I did find was a feature called the "Web Wizard" that would allow me to key in the numbers directly from my computer. This seemed like an ideal solution. Unfortunately, an error message told me that my particular Firefly didn't support "Web Wizard." Another annoying issue was the lights in the LCD screen which kept shutting off during the programming, without any instructions for turning them back on. I couldn't figure out how to program the 9-1-1 number nor determine how to enter the cellphone number into the system. Eventually, the batteries ran down and we had to charge the cell phone again before continuing.

After 5 hours, the phone was programmed enough that my daughter should have been able to call our home number, but the display read "Not Available." Likewise, when we tried calling her, the screen read "Not available" even though the Cingular icon clearly showed when we first activated the phone. At the Firefly activation center, a recording noted to please "call back if the phone did not activate within 30 minutes." I called the number back, and to my frustration discovered there was no customer service option; you are either 1) activating, 2) buying minutes or 3) being routed to the web site.

While the web site is attractive, it was unhelpful in providing a "real" person or online technician to guide you. They do have a online troubleshooting manual, but it did not discuss what to do about the "Not Available," except for the user to verify there is a service provider. It did note that on weekends, the Firefly phone can take up to two hours to activate. After scrolling through 30 minutes of various help options, I finally hit the 'contact us' link where a message indicated to bring the cell phone back to where it was purchased.

28 hours after activating the cell phone, it eventually began working on its own. It would have spared me a lot of frustration knowing ahead of time, that the phone took this long to activate. Being advised that certain displays wouldn't show until activation would have also been nice.

My daughter remarked how easy it was to both places calls and receive incoming calls. She does enjoy the phone and the snappy features that came with it, including a caribeaner clip which she can attach to her backpack. The only downside for her, is that the small size puts the mouth piece close to her cheek, which muffles the voice. A little practice and speaking more slowly should take care of that problem.

Firefly obviously put a lot of time into developing a cute and kid friendly product, but the minimalist approach of the Firefly mobile phone makes it awkward and time consuming for parents to program. Incomplete instructions and a LCD screen that turns off in the middle of programming also made things much more difficult than they needed to be. At $79.99 for the phone and 25¢ per minute line charges, it's inexcusable that Firefly can't provide a Customer Service Rep to answer the phone. Perhaps that's what the "not available" message was really all about.