The Disney Cell Phones - America Edition

so a while back we took a look at these Japanese Disney cell phones that were sold between the late 2000s and early 2010s and I mentioned in that video that Disney mobile actually got its start right here in the U.S though it was very short-lived compared to its Japanese counterpart it only lasted for about 18 months so finding some of the American Disney phones is a little bit tricky but thanks to a viewer named Ryan Bennett who loaned me a couple of these we're going to take a look at what it would have been like to use Disney mobile in the US back in the mid to late 2000s hello everybody and welcome back to another video so just as a refresher or if you happen to miss my other Disney phones video Disney mobile had two components to it when it launched back in 2006. one was the handsets themselves and the other was the actual Network now Disney did not have any physical Network infrastructure of their own but they opted to partner with Sprint to become a mobile virtual Network operator or mvno which basically meant that they could use Sprint network infrastructure for these phones and the network was a very important aspect of Disney mobile because these were not just cell phones with a Disney logo slapped on them yes they did come with a bit of eye candy in the form of themes that you could apply but the main selling point of the service was its parental controls and safety focused features because Disney mobile was designed to be used by kids in the pre-teen to teen age bracket so parents had the ability to limit usage track where the phone is prevent calling the certain numbers and even send Priority messages that you'd have to acknowledge before being able to use the phone normally again so to start things off we're going to take a look at this cell phone right here the Pantech dmp-100 this was one of the first if not the first phone to be offered on Disney mobile it was shown at the launch event in Las Vegas in April of 2006 and they began selling it for fifty nine dollars but before the year was over they were offering it for free on contract and by 2007 they were throwing in free Disney movie tickets so yeah you can see that this whole thing wasn't doing as well as Disney had initially hoped but people definitely purchased this thing and if you were an early adopter of Disney mobile this is very well the phone that you would have ended up using now the hardware itself as you can see is really nothing to write home about it's a basic chunky looking flip phone it definitely really dates this thing that's for sure with Disney mobile text added to the front and the back you open it up here you've got a pretty decent screen it's not terrible and you know you got your your keypad down here so it's not you know the greatest phone in the world I mean and when you compare it to something like the Motorola Razer I mean it really just looks like something ancient and these things began selling in 2004. of course they were more expensive you weren't going to get free movie tickets with this phone I can tell you that um but you know these things just they were so popular and there's a great reason for that these were they just looked really Sleek really futuristic and they just kind of took the concept of a really chunky flip phone and made it something sleek and just really cool looking but again you weren't buying this for the hardware you were buying this for the service that it ran on oh yeah and it also has a big old chunky antenna right here on the top that even extends when you want to get that great cell reception to make a call so yeah again the hardware itself it's it's a pretty standard basic looking phone but if you had waited a little bit of after Disney mobile launched you could opt to get this phone instead this is the Samsung DMS 105 which was one of the first Samsung models to be offered on Disney mobile because yes Disney did partner with a few different phone manufacturers when they were doing all this it was released in April of 2007 and it sold for a price of 19.99 with a service plan yeah 20 bucks could get you this phone and again this one here originally sold for 59 with a service plan so again you could see how Disney was uh trying to really incentivize people to buy these phones now this phone was released alongside the Samsung DMS 110 which was essentially the same phone Hardware wise the only difference was what color they came in and this star pattern you had here on the front which was a little bit of Disney flare they added here as well in addition to the logos so you had two of these designs you could choose from when you were shopping for these phones and you can see there's definitely some major design differences going on between these phones here of course they're both flip phones but this one pretty much has better Hardware all around it looks more modern a lot more Sleek the preview screen here on the front is a little bit larger it's also in color which is definitely a nice upgrade the main display is a little bit larger as well and it just looks more vibrant it's probably a higher resolution too and the keypad here you can see it's a much flatter kind of sleeker design so yeah there's definitely some Hardware changes going on between these two phones but what you won't really find that's changed is the software because all of these Disney phones ran essentially the same Java based system and that was by Design because Disney wanted you to have the same experience regardless of which phone that you use and if you happen to upgrade from one to another well you probably wouldn't have done that very much because again these phones are only around for like 18 months but you know if you would upgrade it or if you had you know changed phones for whatever reason uh you would you're going to expect the same experience you'll be able to get access to all the same features everything was going to be relatively the same so let's go ahead and take a look at what the software experience would have been like using these phones back in the mid 2000s alright so as you've probably already guessed uh with Disney mobile being shut down for over a decade now um actually connecting these phones to the network to use any of those Network focused features is not possible so yeah that is unfortunate obviously but we can still take a look at all of the stuff that would have come with these phones and you know how everything is laid out in the operating system so you can see here that when you first open up the phone this is the screen that you get presented with it it's just in this case is letting us know that we're searching for service because it can't actually find anything but normally this would display kind of like your you know home screen with your service status and all of that these phones do run obviously a a different version of this software they're not exactly the same because you know phone Hardware differs depending on who manufactured it and what processor it has and all of that so you know they're not exactly the same system but they are both Java based and you know they've tried to generally make it the same on like all these screens here you know you got the same options you've got the same menus and everything so the main menu you've got contacts you've got messaging you've got family center you've got entertainment and you have toolbox now I'm going to for most of this video be focusing on the Samsung phone here just because the screen green is better and it just kind of shows up a little bit better here on video but I will occasionally bring in the Pantech phone and show you when there's a difference to point out between these so the first couple options here contacts and messaging there's really nothing that differs you know this from a regular you know phone from around this time you've got your list of contacts and you've got a list of messages nothing really special going on there where that begins is with family center here because this is where you get access to family locator family Monitor and family alert these are some of the the core features of Disney mobile So Family Locator is what allowed parents to track where their children's phones were at all times now it's worth noting that Disney mobile was not necessarily just designed for kids it was definitely targeted at kids but it was also targeted at parents as well in fact parents could use a Disney mobile phone and you know use it to track where their kids phones are but because this phone was set up as a kid's phone when we go into a family locator here it just says Family Locator is only available for adults this phone is assigned to a user under the age of 18 and can be located using GPS technology by adults on your Disney Mobile account in fact it actually says that on the back of the phone here it's printed right at the bottom so yeah you would have to assign this phone uh you know each of the the Disney mobile handsets you had to adult or kid mode depending on who is going to be using it so yeah it's neat that you know this was made for parents as well this could be used as the regular phone without any of these restrictions and speaking of restrictions rage just kidding uh so family monitor is where you could kind of get into the uh restrictive stuff or that that doesn't sound great at all this is where parents could limit you know how many phone calls that their kids could place how many text messages they could send even how many photos that they could take and uh how many things they could download like from the stores that are included on here so of course with this being in kid mode when we go in here we just get this my spending option was where you can view how much of everything that you've spent so to speak so we hit OK here and we can view that we have 50 allowed voice calls apparently we've used 11 25 text messages we've used three uh 10 pictures we've taken zero this is an interesting one I find limiting the amount of pictures that you can take but they they had that option in here and downloads we could spend three dollars now I don't know if this is per month or like how it was uh I would imagine it'd be per month actually so you know if you were a kid using this phone you could go down and see oh I can spend three dollars this month in the You Know ringtone store let me go ahead and spend all of that uh yeah so that's what uh that's what this was for our next option in here is family alert now this is actually pretty cool family alert was the feature that uh parents could use to send Priority messages to their kids phones and that would uh what I mean by priority is when you would open up the phone before you could do anything the message would show up and display and you would have to acknowledge it before you could do anything else but what's really cool is these messages didn't actually cost you anything to send and receive so Ryan actually told me that his family all had Disney mobile phones back then and they would use this family alert feature to send free text messages to each other where it would normally cost them like 10 to 20 cents per message so that's pretty huge in fact if we go in here Ryan told me that there are some messages saved on here and he said I could show them because there's no like personal info or anything in them but if we go to alerts received we can open this up and here's a message from Paul at 5 27 pm on 11 and probably November 9th I don't know of what year but he says I'm here and we can reply and say maybe we'll first send to Paul yes and let's say okay not please okay and we'll send of course it won't actually do anything but you know that's that's how you would send messages to people using family alert so there are a decent amount of alerts in here if we scroll down we got Marilyn Paul Marilyn Marilyn Joe let's see what Joe said on uh 8 54 p.m on October 6th landed good flight that's awesome uh so yeah that I mean it's just a cool feature I mean it probably wasn't really intended to be used that way you know it was meant for sending priority messages to your kids but there's nothing stopping you from just using it as a regular text messaging client because there was no limit as far as I know as to how many messages you could send um you also have quick alerts here and that's that list that we saw where you've got like a bunch of stuff uh you know of like messages you would commonly send to people so maybe you want to change okay to something else you could edit that or just delete it rather and we'll say yes we want to delete that and it's been deleted and now we can add a new one let's maybe just re-enter okay K here so let me uh use our glorious keypad here there you go we also have send alert which is going to be that same screen like when we went to a reply to Paul we got the same screen here so you would add recipient you can send it to more than one person as well uh so you could do that no no issues there so yeah definitely a really cool feature and a neat story kind of how it was used to just get free text messaging which I think is really cool so yeah going back to Family Center we also have call control which is pretty self-explanatory this would allow you as a parent to limit uh the allowed times that you could place calls and numbers that you were allowed to call so my schedule here again with this being a kid's phone is only going to allow us to view when we're allowed to make calls which it can't do anything in this case but we also have always on numbers so you would definitely want to put as a parent you know put your cell phone your home phone in here so you would always you know your kids would always be able to call those numbers but all the other numbers would be restricted and Shop family is a store where you could buy additional stuff for Family Center of course it doesn't actually work anymore um because you know the service has been shut down but we can view this uh or attempt to view this preview uh but it it will fail obviously but I think we can kind of sort of view the uh the main landing page here recent buys is where all the stuff you recently purchased would show up spend that three dollars wisely kids and uh yeah that's Family Center Entertainment is next up and this is where you've got uh well there's a decent amount of stuff in here first is shop entertainment this is kind of the main store per se because this is where you can buy ringtones and themes and all sorts of stuff some games in here even additional applications but if we go back here you've got Disney Zone uh this is where you can get access to Disney Radio among a couple of other things again we can't actually do anything here but there it is or there it was rather and you've got my ringtones my themes my images my games my application occasions my subscriptions and a web browser so I'm gonna bring in the other phone here as we go through these ringtones because there are some different ringtones between these two so we'll go in here and I can also show you how the menus kind of look on the Pantech phone here because they don't look exactly the same of course you have the same options but like if I go into Family Center you can see that just the design of these menus looks a lot more basic um so yeah there you go of course different phone different Hardware all of that but we'll go into entertainment we'll go into ringtones so yeah you can see there are some different ringtones here you've got more on the Samsung phone here there is a Disney mobile ringtone which is the same between these two so we'll go ahead and play it on here [Music] I think there's some defunct land content possibility here maybe Kevin could go through and figure out who made the Disney mobile jingle this time but yeah so Disney mobile you've got Follow the Leader you also have like ring one I think these are the standard like ring sounds yeah so let's bring two here [Music] yeah so these are probably I don't know why they just named these one through five and they gave a name to everything else okay there's kind of a more standard traditional ring uh and you would pick whichever one you want you would assign it and you know there you go uh we can also view info I wonder if they've got like okay audio MP3 okay vendor Disney oh look at that that's awesome so it actually tells you it's pre-loaded or not so let's uh let's verify that here let's go through all of these and see if they are in fact all standard ones pre-loaded okay I know this one's definitely preloaded Disney mobile also has to be pre-loaded yep Electro pre-loaded granted wish pre-loaded and Hawaiian Roller Coaster does not say pre-loaded so maybe this one oh wait a second no preload it was just uh it just was uh this name went to an additional line so this one here let's view info on uh follow the leader see if it says it does not say if it's pre-loaded or not on here that's interesting let's try Disney mobile because this one definitely would have been pre-loaded okay so the pre-loaded line has been removed so okay we can't verify that on here that is interesting um but we can see oh okay these are Samsung ringtones okay that makes sense so we can at least view the vendor so vendor Disney vendor Disney uh this one's obviously the top one here is vendor Disney so these are all Samsung ringtones this would have probably been a standard on like all Samsung phones from this time oh yeah that's that's me spending too much time on ringtones probably now themes this is exciting because uh this is where you could kind of customize your phone a little bit of course ringtones are also customization but this is more visual customization so Disney mobile here is the theme that we already have applied if we go over here to Mickey's classmates so this is kind of what that looks like we'll just assign all of these and kind of go through them and I'll do this on the pan tech phone as well so Mickey's classmates is applied so this screen obviously doesn't change but we go in here here's the new menu so it changes to a bunch of Disney characters here instead of just those icons as we scroll through the list and here's what the menus look like so you got kind of that orange accent color now let's see what's next on the docket we've got Penny Lane so we'll apply this one oh we got some look at that Fawn oh my gosh so yeah you got kind of some pink accents color stuff going on all those green here okay and let's go vibin guys let's Vibe it up in here that's definitely a Vibe is this a Disney theme it is so all these themes were created by Disney none from Samsung in here I don't really know what what this is supposed to be um but it's definitely a Vibe that's for sure so messaging you've got kind of that same blue accent color that we saw on the first one I'm gonna actually apply Mickey's classmates because this seems like the most Disney theme uh on here so Mickey's classmates assigned and while we're on the topic of themes let me uh swap over to our good old Pantech Disney mobile phone here and we'll jump back and uh whoops I almost played that ringtone again we'll uh go to theme it so you see some of the menu options have different names as well between these phones um and we've got more themes in here you've also got an Epcot theme too so Disney mobile should be the one that we currently have applied let's see if it gives us a preview here on this yes it does so there it is we'll just back out of that and we'll start with Bambi this phone is definitely a lot slower than this one here so I assume it has a oh it's actually like timing it's almost going to sleep while it's assigning this here uh theme Bambi assigned okay so we'll back out of that yeah there you go there you go see what the accent color is going to messaging here kind of looks like that same accent color I wonder if that'll change between these themes here what's the next one Blizzard Beach so there you go and let's check the accent color here it's blue again so I'm gonna guess that the accent color is probably not going to change between these themes here on this phone which is kind of unfortunate so Casey had bats and there we go we'll just scroll through this briefly and same accent color I'm really excited to see this Epcot theme oh look at that this kind of looks like some concept art actually and you can see the font down there looks uh rather futuristic looking it's kind of got that I don't know cyber tack look to it if that makes any sense uh and let's see what extreme is with the oh wait a second oh wait oh whoa there's way more theme than I thought okay I I didn't see the scroll bar over there yeah there you go man look at this extreme action going on this is actually a pretty cool design though I gotta say I like that gradient there that green to blue kind of yeah that looks really neat um though accent color it's the same Floral Fantasy that's definitely a Floral Fantasy and got lots of flowers going on there really cool designs though I definitely like that artwork and again accent color is the same so next up we have Mickey and friends which is the same theme we saw on the Samsung phone but let's see how it Compares oh this does look different okay this is way different so yeah let's see if it's the same character on each one so Mickey nope it's not the same character okay well Goofy's on Family Center and yeah okay so there are some different character choices that's interesting um so yeah same named theme but they are different you know variants of it here which is neat so yeah an accent color nope yeah I probably should have stopped checking at this point but no I'm not gonna do that because we've got one more theme small world concept art and there you go definitely some cool looking concept art and the Moment of Truth nope it's the same the same accent color so yeah those are all of the themes on uh on the Pantech phone here now going into games we do have some different games on these phones as well we'll just stick here with the pantek one for now the checkout Nemo's aquarium oh free trial has expired press ok to launch in demo mode I don't know what to expect here but we've got aquarium options uh uh help credits and okay it's not it's not registering Me Maybe I can't go over anymore oh no I could about I had to hit that like six times all right let's just go to aquarium then whoa dude the temperature needs to be turned down during the day as the tank can get totally hot okay yeah what on Earth is this game gonna be I like don't even know please wait this is gonna be like a Block Breaker game a maze thing what are we what are we doing oh it's still it's still loading okay oh so I'm okay I gotta turn the temperature down I guess interact mini game okay so this is like a is this like a click like a point-and-click game even though you can't actually click on anything what does inner okay feed fish oh is it like just one of these where it's like a pocket kind of Tamagotchi sort of thing where you're like setting the temperature and you know interact with them and take care of them oh and I guess it timed out all right well I guess that's that uh that is Nemo's aquarium uh Tetris demo is just Tetris and what's Trivial Pursuit Disney demo continue with oh there's a game in progress holy cow it's kept that all this time again the screen's going to sleep okay press to roll Shake roll okay we got a four Disney personalities Disney Music Disney personal oh I went I guess I went back uh animated films live action films and TV okay let's do animated films who was the voice of the narrator oh I don't even know holy cow okay continue oh you can I guess skip a question as well um oh I I hit okay and then like it didn't load the next screen I hit okay again to make sure register and then it just hit OK twice and it selected the wrong answer um so yeah that's gonna be yeah there's definitely some delay in this which is rather annoying but yeah it's a trivia game with Disney stuff I mean what more does there really need to be said um oh yeah let's save the game for when I send these back to Ryan maybe he wants to finish the Disney uh mobile trivia game here and it wants us to buy the full thing we're not gonna of course we can't even do that now and yeah so that's everything under games aside from Tetris which I'm not really going to demo because we all know what Tetris is let's be honest let's move over and take a look at the games on the Samsung phone which hopefully should be much more playable because this phone is just a lot uh better to use um so we've got Bejeweled Block Breaker Deluxe Lilo and Stitch and Tetris it looks like all of these are just standard like Bejeweled we can view info vendor electronic Arts Block Breaker Deluxe plan demo Tetris is going to say what plan demo Electronic Arts Lilo and Stitch vendor M Disney okay do you want to play with sound is that even a question of course we do it's nice that they give you the option to mute if you're like in a I don't know office waiting room like for a doctor's office or something and you want to play your Lilo and Stitch game but you don't want to like piss everyone off um all right let's uh play demo let's just go into this blind see what this is I don't even know press down or eight to climb down okay well I could use the numpad that's actually much better I think okay climb down great press up or two to climb up great press left or four to switch sides great left jump left okay so it's a jumping game so this is like just a tutorial thing and can we skip this I guess not oh tutorial complete okay I guess that's what that was so it seems like your goal is to stop these things from uh like climbing up to the top and I just died there unfortunately no no no oh wow I actually did that oh okay I guess I just beat the level but yeah so that's your Lilo and Stitch uh jumping game we'll just exit out of that and that is the only uh Disney game on here now we did skip over my images but it's just where you can view pictures you've taken uh my applications will view anything that you've downloaded also views Disney Channel and Radio Disney in here which of course won't actually work but there they are my subscriptions would show anything that you had subscribed to which it just says connection failed of course and you've got a web browser as well um which we can actually use but you know if you ever wanted to browse uh you know a bunch of WAP pages on gosh that was always uh if you first of all it always costs like way too much but even if you were able to do it it just it just was not a pleasant experience uh browsing the internet with uh just using WAP Pages um but yeah so if you go into toolbox here we do have some like utilities and stuff camera here this is really cool so camera does have some Disney Flair going on let me go into options here and you can add a frame right and this is where you just have a bunch of Disney frames you can choose from uh and so let me just take an awesome photo of Eddie here and there we go it's saving the photo into the gallery and look at that photo isn't that awesome we'll just back out of that but yeah you've got a few uh a few um themes here or filters rather to to go through wishes or frames I said the wrong name twice but yeah you've got a bunch of these in here to scroll through uh which is cool you got even one from The Incredibles um and uh you do have you know some on this as well on this they're just labeled Disney frame one through 18. so these they actually have names which is nice but we do have some of the same frames as you can see this one here is the same between these two yeah but there you go you've got a bunch of uh Disney frames to add to your photos you have a little bit of fun that way and you got kind of standard stuff like a voice recorder we go into tools here you've got you know Bluetooth options calculator alarm clock notepad kind of your standard set of utilities you would have on a phone pretty much like any flip phone from this time and your settings stuff but yeah there you have it guys that is uh pretty much all that we can look at on these phones so that's Disney mobile that's what it would have been like to experience these phones back in 2006 2007 when the service was in its prime that great 18-month run it had I'm sure Disney was really happy about that uh but no seriously they were probably much happier that this service performed much better in Japan so you know good for them Disney certainly needs more money as we all know uh but uh but yeah I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did be sure to give it a thumbs up get subscribed all that good stuff I want to give a huge thank you to Ryan for Lending me both of these phones for this video was really really generous of you so thank you for making this video possible and thanks to all of you guys for watching and as always I will see you in the next video you [Music] foreign

Channel: Michael MJD

Views: 127,769

Keywords: video, michaelmjd, mjd7999, game, review, overview, apple, microsoft, unboxing, tutorial, windows, how-to, mac, os, system, michael mjd

Id: KA97ZMg6Blw

Length: 28min 51sec (1731 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023