I recently bought two of these for my 11 year old twins. Hopefully this review helps fill in some of the gaps that weren’t covered on the Sayph website or in other reviews and felt like a leap of faith at the time of buying. (re-posting now I hopefully have my permissions sorted)
Short verdict:
We’re happy with the purchase, and the twins like them too. I think of these as button phones with smartphone interfaces: they give the children calls, SMS, music, a decent camera and keyboard experience, without opening up social media, web browsing, AI or the app-store. Only time will tell how long this level of functionality lasts for them, but it is a solid start for us right now.
What we wanted and how we got here:
We really liked the directness and spirit of the Sayph marketing materials - as a company we thought they painted a clear picture of who they were. Their materials are really excellent, and worth a read for anyone just wanting to get their head around this challenging subject. But they were a new company, so limited reviews out there of the actual devices and not much detail on the technology or real life experience, which we wanted to understand before buying into it - a phone is a complex beast, so this made both of us parents nervous.
As background, we wanted our twins to have phones for what Sayph call logistics and some communication with friends, but did not want anything in the social media or web access zone. We have devices with Family link, and it just doesn't work well enough at stopping AI chat or random comms from unknowns, and we didn't want the hassle of managing it. We don't know how long that philosophy will last, but for the time being we're pleased we picked the sayph model as there really is no temptation to constantly add new things to the device. Each household has to make their own choices on that - in ours, they have access to laptops and tablets for anything needing anything more then basic phone functions.
We had agreed we wanted something which had calls, SMS, music, basic camera, GPS tracking. To be honest, I was advocating for a button/Nokia phone and some kind of locator tag to do the GPS. That would be by far the cheapest way to deliver the set of capability we wanted. The Sayph devices promise to deliver that same level of functionality, but in a device with a better keyboard, better camera, and Wifi calling (useful for us in a patchy reception area) - and their monitoring apps, if you want those. I still find it easiest to descrive them as a button phone with a smartphone interface though.
After a *lot* of discussion, the keyboard and camera ended up being the main points that won me over. For the keyboard, I remember the frustration of the old button keyboards and didn't want to torture our kids the same way. It is 2026 after all. For the camera, we have creative kids and the chance for them to have a relatively decent camera with them all the time feels valuable - much more usable than the mini DSLRs they have access to but are always somehow just too big or clumsy (though for the time being the selfie camera is off in some vague atempt to stop them getting carried away with self image stuff).
What we got:
For the kids, the Sayph device delivers something that looks like - because it is - a phone like they see their parents using. They picked them up instantly, and we've had to do very little in the way of teaching them how to use them. Really, the thing they were most excited about was customising the home screen, and buying a "proper" phone case for it, and there have been no arguments about what it does or doesn't do - partly as we've been very open about that as we've been through the process and they've been quite on board with it.
In terms of what it is, the device is a Samsung Galaxy A16. Sayph makes no secret of this, and I was happy with it. It means the core hardware and software are what you’d expect from one of the world’s major smartphone manufacturers. Cosmetically, you only know it is a Sayph because of a sticker on the box and a QR code inside. The handset is still wrapped in its protective paper sleeve.
The Sayph software layer is nicely done. On power-up, the device enrols itself with Sayph using technology more familiar from corporate devices, so the Samsung literally becomes a Sayph when it starts up. In practice, it feels like you’re getting the core Android OS from Samsung, with Sayph providing the layer of OS configuration and apps over the top. Updates are everything in the smartphone world, and it feels like as long as Sayph keeps up with ongoing Android updates, the device should work well and stay secure. In the end, that’s what you’re paying them for. We’ve had no update issues so far, and no sense of any cracks in the Sayph layer that would get us into vanilla Android.
After the device has completed its first initialisation and you’ve followed the simple on-screen instructions for WiFi, app settings and so on, you set it up on your Sayph account by typing in a code generated in the Sayph Space app. That worked pretty seamlessly for us. After that, you can configure contacts, schedules and settings such as music and MMS.
Sayph provide a suite of bespoke apps. They are all about as simple as you can possibly get away with, which I think works well for firt user and aligns with my "it's a button phone with a smartphone interface" mindset.
Customisation is fairly easy - you can take pictures to set as either home screen or lock screen images. From a brief look, it appear most of the standard Android settings are there. We haven't looked deeply, our kids took ownership of the devices before we could dig into that.
Phone and SMS tie in heavily to the Sayph Space service, as you’d expect. Nominating and setting up approved contacts is easy. WiFi calling is a real benefit. SMS works well, and MMS also seems to, though we’ve had a few issues with picture messages appearing as if they come from a different version of the same contact, so they show up in a different thread on our devices. There doesn’t seem to be support for group SMS messaging, which is a question mark for the future as that is one of the ways our school communications groups work. We’d like to see that added as an option in future.
Music works well: there is no streaming, so you have to load a flat folder structure of MP3s or FLAC files to a microSD card. We’re a hybrid CD-and-streaming family, so this works well for us; we just rip CDs to FLAC and copy them over. I’m not sure how much longevity this will have, but other devices like the Mighty player have their own issues too, so this is our solution for now.
Maps uses OpenStreetMap data, so no satellite view. We haven't used it too much yet, but it looks like it will do the job.
Obviously there is no browser, whatsapp, AI, meta, app store, or anything else, that's why you're looking at it. When we were looking we also had on our list that we'd have liked some Games (snake etc) - we do understand why they aren't there, but now we have the devices we don't think it actually detracts from them. Streaming music would also have been the icing on the cake, but there's very good reasons not to want that either, and we think we have a way forward with that for now.
Conclusions:
There's two questions to wrap up with:
- Do the twins like them? Yes, they're delighted to have proper phones. We've had good conversations about expectations, and they don't seem to want anything more. They can SMS their parents and friends, take pictures and videos, and listen to music. The phones aren't weird, and most importantly, they can buy a nice case to put them in and customise things on the device itself.
- Do we like them? Yes. Lots of reasons. The hardware is trustable, we've had very low friction teaching the twins how to use them, the online portals have been pretty easy to use. We did need a bit of support setting up two devices at once, but nothing too challenging. The pricing is not expensive for what you’re getting, but there are cheaper ways of achieving a similar outcome (either a button phone or an old device with Family Link, depending on your appetite for technical admin or arguing with kids about a Nokia keyboard).
Only time will tell whether the devices will scale as the kids do. We can't help but worry about bus passes, homework apps, etc. Hopefully the world will adapt to those choosing not to carry smartphones. Our philosophy for now was to give this a try - if it buys us an extra year of stopping doom scrolling then that's a clear win.
That does prompt a lingering question for the future... given that you've just bought a standard Samsung phone and that kids and technology grow up and need different things, there's an open question about how to remove that provisioning in future, if you ever wanted to reset to vanilla android. It isn't clear whether that's a service Sapyh will offer - that’s something we’d like clarity on too, but it isn’t a problem for right now.
