Pinwheel Kids PhonesReviews of pinwheel.com

At first I loved Pinwheel and the service however after the phone charging port broke after 5 months and they would only give 20% off another phone to replace it I have decided they are awful. Ulephone the brand of the phone itself offers a year warranty however if bought through Pinwheel it is not covered. The breaking of the port is one of the more common problem on the Ulephone. My daughter was 14 when she got the phone and knows how to plug in a phone. We have never had a charging port break before. BEWARE what they offers is great but their phones and customer service are AWFUL! I would definitely searchbout another program similar and go with that.

I chose a pinwheel phone for my 12 year old because my partner and I wanted robust parental controls and the ability to choose/restrict which apps could be installed on the phone. While the parental controls have worked so far we have encountered numerous other problems. The app is fairly buggy, sometimes my child will suddenly be unable to use the phone at all until it has been restarted several times, but my biggest complaint is when it comes to apps. There is an 'approved' list of apps you can install and pinwheel advertises that there is a way for parents to request apps they would like added to the list - however, these apps must go through an internal, and entirely opaque, approval process- so if you'd like your child to have an alarm app, or perhaps a chess app, maybe they need goodreads for a school assignment, you're going to have to ask pinwheel to approve it. The catch is that they won't. You don't get to control what your child has access to, a board of unknown experts do. If you go through customer service instead of their app request board - which their website states can expedite your request - it won't help. Every app I have requested has either had the request ignored or denied.

I'm absolutely furious with this terrible phone and service. First, I had to order a Pinwheel phone thru their website and my choices were ancient (a Galaxy A13) to be able to use it on my phone plan (which is Verizon). Then as I got the phone up and running it kept playing the Android chargeup noise randomly for no reason. Usually 2-3 times a day, but eventually it kept going off nonstop to the point it was becoming a nuisance. After a few months i plugged it back in, and lo and behold.. the damn thing wouldn't stop making the sound. My kid couldn't sleep with it next to him. Customer support demanded I record a video of the tone. I called customer service and requested an address so I could mail this POS phone back. They couldn't give me a physical address and told me to keep the phone (which is garbage). Needless to say this company is a huge waste of money forcing you use ancient phones with software that barely works, forced you to learn some backwater programming just to keep the thing working, and it's absolutely not worth it at all.

I was so excited to get this phone for my 11 year-old daughter and it worked well for a couple of months. She was careful to take good care of the phone and it has no physical damage, however, after just 6 months, the phone started malfunctioning to the point of being completely useless. It opens and closes apps at random, won't let my daughter text, won't let me access the settings, etc. Their customer service just asked for more and more proof (long descriptions, more descriptions, videos of the phone malfunctioning, longer videos of the phone malfunctioning, clearer videos, etc) as a stalling tactic, but would not replace the clearly defective phone that we received.

I have had tons of problems with this phone. From text messages not being shown to issues with the device not working with the presets I put on as a parent. Customer service has not been helpful at all. Telling me to “turn it off and turn it back on” is not tech support.

My son had a Gabb Phone for close to 3 years with no problems. We decided to get a phone that would let him get needed apps, but would also not let him have full reign of the internet. We bought a Pinwheel. Big mistake. We bought the phone several weeks before Christmas as a Christmas gift. When we finally activated it, it worked for 2 weeks, then completely went black. We wanted to factory reset it, but there's no way to factory reset it like a normal phone. After multiple emails with different people at pinwheel, they finally told me how to factory reset it. Oh, They also said I can't get a refund for my purchase because I've owned it more than 30 days. Which I explained is a dumb policy, because I bought it as a Christmas gift, and it clearly wasn't activated until just before Christmas. I pointed out that they can clearly see that it only works for 2 weeks. Anyway, after resetting it, it just spins in an endless loop of being unable to log into any Google accounts, or set up the phone at all. So I paid $200 for a POS that doesn't work, $15 for pinwheel's "service" as well as the monthly fee to Mint. DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY OR TIME. Pinwheel is the worst phone I've ever used, which says a lot because I used a $35 TracFone for years when I was young and broke. UPDATE 1.25.23 I had to work with the Pinwheel IT support to do a crazy (nonsensical) set of steps to reboot, then factory reset the phone. Then I couldn't get the phone to set up again (like a normal phone). It worked for a total of 5 days, and it's doing this again. The phone is frozen, can't make or receive calls, and NOW IT WONT CHARGE BEYOND 20%. This was one of the WORST purchases I've ever made. Their customer service is crap. Although friendly, they refuse to give me a refund for a phone that has worked for less than 1 month.

While the Pinwheel monitoring platform and app ecosystem work well enough (we experienced many of the same glitches outlined in other one star reviews), the phones Pinwheel uses are horrible. Our son has gone through two Pinwheel Slim phones at this point in less than a year. Both stopped working after being dropped on the ground and causing a small amount of screen damage. Both phones had on the screen protector and case Pinwheel sells when they were dropped. The phone brand they use (Blu) is not popular enough for our local phone repair stores to carry replacement screens. Our only option is to buy another phone through Pinwheel - where they will sell you a refurbished Slim for a slight discount if you contact the support team. They do sell a "rugged" phone option, but at this point I have no faith in any of their hardware. I'm not willing to give Pinwheel an additional $250 to take another chance. Buyer beware. When the first phone broke, I suggested that Pinwheel offer third-party insurance for their phones (like almost all other companies that sell cell phones), and I was told that wasn’t part of their business model. I think it is unfortunate and unsustainable that their business model is to ask parents to buy a new phone every time one is dropped. If I can get insurance for a used iPhone at a third-party reseller, Pinwheel can offer insurance for their phones especially when Pinwheel's target audience are accident-prone teens.

PARENTS OF TECH SAVVY KIDS BEWARE!! I am so frustrated with this device. It's been countless hours of customer service with a variety of problems spanning from not getting phone calls, not being able to send photos, and now my 15 year old has some how gotten on the internet and is chatting with strangers which is EXACTLY THE REASON I BOUGHT THESE PHONES. Why in the world would I see a reason to spend hundreds of dollars on devices (3) to keep my kids safe and then she's able to easily open a photo album and share it and then chat with people! I have no idea how long she's been able to do this and now I have to clean up this mess. Please make sure your phones are safe this could be our kids lives at stake.