My daughter just started Jr. High, which leaves my 9-year-old son to head to school on his own. He does have friends that he travels with, and the school is not far from our house, but I still wasn’t quite comfortable with him going. He doesn’t need a smartphone with service (even though he has a smartphone, it only has wifi since I’m not paying for him to have data on it yet), and so we decided to get him a Gizmo Gadget.

I love this GPS watch, and he has been able to let me know when he makes it to school, and I can tell him when it’s time to come home from the park. Sometimes he forgets to let me know he got to school, so I set up some alerts to notify me automatically when he gets there.

Unfortunately, this device is only available on Verizon. I am just glad we switched to Verizon a couple years ago. Not only has our coverage vastly improved, but we can also now use the best GPS watch available for kids!

As much as I have loved the device itself, the Gizmo Hub, which is the application I use to control the watch from my own phone, has left a LOT to be desired. The user interface was terrible, and the settings were difficult to navigate.

Yesterday, I noticed that my Gizmo Hub had updated on my phone, so I opened it up to see if there were any improvements to the interface. I was so pleasantly surprised to see that not only did they change the interface, it looks like they rebuilt the app from the ground up.

The new app looks amazing and is super easy to use.

It even seems to find the Gizmo much more quickly as well. From the Gizmo Hub you can add contacts that your child can use on their watch. When you set them as a “Buddy” your child can call them, but in order to text, you need to set the contact as a Caregiver and have them install the Gizmo Hub as well to text with your kid.

I am so excited about the new app! It will be much nicer to use now that it seems most of the bugs are worked out. If you haven’t updated yet… DO IT NOW!

Family Tech Zone