myFirst Fone S4 review: what makes this smartwatch built for parenting tick?

Plenty of devices let parents track their children. But few have an ecosystem that’s built around ensuring that your children are only in contact with people who aren’t douchenozzles, if you pardon the language.

The myFirst Fone S4 is a purpose-built device for 6–10-year-olds, built around GPS accuracy, a closed social loop, and gamified habit-building. Crucially, it stays out of the app store, the open internet, and the dark corners of WhatsApp.

It’s a watch where its features are secondary to how it fits into real-world parenting in Singapore. But all the same, the Fone S4’s features are nothing to be scoffed at.

A tracker with the necessary features

Trackers are a dime a dozen, and most child-centric devices do a fair enough job of letting you know where your child is. The Fone S4 is the only one in its class that combines dual-band GPS, eSIM with free roaming, habit-tracking, and a parent-controlled social loop. It even has an always-on AMOLED display, which adds polish and vibrancy — something even some adult smartwatches lack (albeit the budget ones).

The Fone S4 will likely not be the most fully featured watch in a growing competitive field. Still, it covers all the bases well: the 5MP camera isn’t going to trump anything you have on your phone, but it takes a decent selfie with a comfortably wide viewing angle. It’s as basic as you can get, so the good news is that your child can learn to take good photos just by using background light from an early age. The camera is also used for calls, and you can have group video calls with up to 8 participants in your circle.

The device is fairly responsive, and the menu options are pretty intuitive for the most part; menus are not nested to hell, and children can easily get to what they want by process of elimination if they really have no clue.

The same goes for parents — myFirst’s guided onboarding is simple if you follow it step by step; you might struggle a little if you don’t, but you will get there eventually just by going through the options.

The myFirst Circle app is the central hub that hosts ‘private Instagram’ and ‘private WhatsApp’ on top of parental controls. It also gives you access to practical features, such as enabling and disabling calls, chats, etc., during school hours, while still allowing SOS and location tracking. It’s all about treading the fine line between security and overreach, and safety features like automatically connecting after three missed calls to the child show that myFirst has put a lot of thought into this.

One of the new features — magiCode — communicates preset messages by vibration, much like Morse code, allowing you to drop quick, pre-coded messages that both you and your child can feel and understand without looking at the device. It’s meant to enable quiet cues like “wrap up soon” without needing a screen.

It sounds good on paper, but in practice, there is minimal variation between intervals, despite the range of patterns you can create based on intensity, frequency, and length. At the end of the day, you’re better off keeping your patterns as simple as possible to make them more distinct and recognisable.

Battery life is decent and should last through a school day with moderate use, though it’s borderline for a device trying to do so much. The always-on display does affect battery life slightly, but since this is a watch that needs to be charged every day, the impact is arguably less significant.

Might be the perfect holiday tracker

Right out of the box, the Fone S4 comes with an integrated eSIM and a roaming plan that works in most popular holiday destinations. It’s matched with a dual-band GPS (L1 + L5), making it more reliable in high-density areas and concrete-heavy cityscapes where signal reflections can disrupt tracking.

In testing, the Fone S4 tracked like a phone, so you can more or less narrow it down to your kid being roughly where they are supposed to be, or, at worst, across the street. You can view your child’s location in real time on the Circle app — you can even monitor their journeys on a schedule — cutting down on those annoying “BOY AH WHERE ARE YOU” calls. Your kid will certainly appreciate the restraint.

The fact that Singapore is probably one of the safest places in the world makes this somewhat overkill, but abroad, this could be a lifesaver. Unfortunately, since we haven’t tried roaming ourselves, we say definitively it’s the ultimate holiday tracker. But it’s good to know this could be a good insurance policy, and you can try it out for recurring holiday destinations to see how well it tracks at your regular destinations.

Guardrails on your wrist

But what makes the Fone S4 unique is its private social network — myFirst Circle is a safe space where parents have complete control and oversight over their children’s interactions with people, without denying them the opportunity to socialise.

In practice, it’s a miniature social platform for friends and family. Think Instagram with guardrails, where they can learn social skills and familiarise themselves with social dynamics before they deal with the chaos of the real world. It works the same as the ‘real deal’, except that parents can vet requests to enter the inner circle.

But the Fone S4 adds another string to its bow — the carrot gamefication system incentivises children to take part in activities (e.g. create two social posts today) with carrot rewards that can be exchanged for cosmetics like virtual stickers. Some may argue that this may not feel like an incentive, but parents can substitute real-world rewards. It’s up to you to decide what the points mean, but the S4 helps gamify the process to build receptiveness — and habit. This is just the warm-up for what’s really cool: parents can create custom tasks to help their child form good habits. While it’s not the slickest interface, it works well enough.

Life-changing starts with habit-changing

The myFirst Fone S4 is far more interesting than it lets on. It’s primarily a guardian-lite wearable that keeps kids reachable, builds routines, and teaches safe digital interaction — all under the guise of a smartphone substitute.

It’s not without flaws, though they are not deal-breakers. The one-day battery life is just about adequate, but a little more headroom would be far more reassuring. And magiCode is currently more of a cool idea than a must-have feature.  But at the moment, it’s one of the few watches, if not the only one, that has a clear purpose — and the tools to match.