RIM Releasing Parental Controls For All OS 5.0+ BlackBerrys Soon
RIM slipped in some new parental controls that showed up in their latest OS leaks and now they are taking it further. They have announced that the BlackBerry Curve 9220 & Curve 9320 will be rolling out with the new parental controls built in. What is very interesting is that RIM has confirmed on their blog that:
Parental Controls is an integrated feature that provides parents and guardians simple options to help them protect their children by restricting access to specific functions, features and applications. A free download of Parental Controls will be made available for BlackBerry� 7.0 OS and BlackBerry� 6 OS next month; and for BlackBerry� Device Software 5.0 shortly after through the BlackBerry App World� storefront.
That means OS 5.0+ devices should all be getting parental controls in the next month or two. As far as I have seen so far the parental controls make use of the IT Policy structure RIM already has in place for enterprise customers so it makes sense that RIM would be able to bring it to older OS versions. You can check out the official user guide of Parental Controls for more details.
I understand the need for parental control, but that IT policy screws up 3rd Party apps. You can't disable your firewall settings. Before .402 you were allowed to, now you can't because of this stupid IT policy.
I like that ideal as being a parent myself,I have a BB OS 5 ..I would like to pass down to my 13 yr daughter,knowing It haves such parental controls....sounds like a winner to me
I don't have the 7.1.0.402 OS on my phone anymore to look at the details, but I think the controls were quite useful.
For example, if I remember it correctly, texting could be blocked, so parents can offer their kids an unlimited BIS lite plan and not be worried about expensive texts on the monthly bill.
It sounds like it may be a AppWorld download, so you can opt out of it. It is not in the current Rogers 391, but was in the leaked 402. It may have been in the leak for testing only and available as an option for official OS.
As an aside, if parents started blocking texting, kids with phones that do not support BBM may be subject to peer pressure to get a BlackBerry; possibly good for BlackBerry sales.
For example, if I remember it correctly, texting could be blocked, so parents can offer their kids an unlimited BIS lite plan and not be worried about expensive texts on the monthly bill.
I would love it if these IT control policies were added to accounts with just Families with kids. Don't punish the ones that have to gripe about the Firewall settings and Third Party Apps not working correctly.
I would love it if these IT control policies were added to accounts with just Families with kids. Don't punish the ones that have to gripe about the Firewall settings and Third Party Apps not working correctly.
Sent from my BlackBerry 9900 using Tapatalk
What I was trying to say in the post was that it was in a leaked release, probably for testing, and may not be in the releases provided by carriers, using Rogers 7.1.0391 as the example.
