The last time I reviewed a rugged phone, I promised HikeWithKids wasn't going to become a phone review site.

It isn't. This will be the last one for a long time.

So I got rugged phones for my kids and now I want to explain what the hell I was thinking.

But why?

It started as a discussion between my wife and I. Our kids loved the idea of taking photos, so let's find a digital camera for kids. Unfortunately kids digital cameras kind of suck: at the time we searched the options we looked at were over priced and lacked quality. Off-hand I found myself thinking "at this price I could just get a phone and that has a camera built in".

I landed on the Ulefone Armor X8. It's not speedy, it's not flashy but it's solid, washable and can take decent quality photos in daylight. And at $80 the time I picked it up, it came in at a price I could tolerate when compared to kids camera options.

Compared to my chunky Ulefone Armor 9 in its case, the Armor X8 is relatively slim and small.

So are the kids phone junkies?

In truth sometimes they get stuck on their phones, but we have been treating this as an opportunity to weed out the wrong behaviours early and teach the right ones.

To avoid the kids acting like phone junkies I've loaded the phones with a launcher called Kid's Shell. This allows the phones to be locked down only to parent-selected apps. In this case camera and gallery. I've also added Threema (with my wife and I as contacts for the kids) and Locus Maps Pro.

Locus Maps is still something the kids aren't familiar with, but that's to be expected. My objective here is to get the kids familiar with the use of mapping software.

And what about the photos?

I'll let you decide. Here are some photos my daughter took on our last trip to Halls Gap. She loves flowers, and also took some photos of the view. What do you think?