The iPhone Mom

Mobicip provides a “safe browser” alternative to Safari.  It’s a way to restrict what your children are allowed to access online using an iPhone or iPod Touch. I found it to be a fabulous product. There are two versions of Mobicip, standard and premium. I’ve tried both and will give you a quick run down.

Standard: This is available through the $4.99 app. The first time you use the app you’ll establish a user account with Mobicip. You’ll be asked to enter in your child’s first name and select a filtering level – elementary school, middle school or high school. Each filtering level blocks different types of sites. Elementary is the most restrictive in it’s blocking, high school the least. A summary of what types of sites are blocked can be found on the Mobicip website under “User Levels and Policy. There you can also read about the real time content filtering that the app employs. I’m impressed with what they’ve done and the resources they’re using to filter out all the icky stuff. Plus, they’ve done it in a way that doesn’t really slow down the internet access. When I was browsing and using Mobicip I didn’t find much of a noticeable delay in the internet speed.

The app comes with preset bookmarks and the kids can also add their own. They’ll be able to create and use bookmark folders just like you do in Safari. The Google search is also still present at the top of the screen, only when they use it in Mobicip it’s subject to their search restrictions.  I was surprised to find that it offers search suggestions. I tried a search for Hannah Montana and by the time I’d typed in Hannah it had pulled up a list of suggestions for what I might be searching for. Another really cool feature is the ability to use multiple tabs, just like in Safari. The iPhone’s copy/paste feature will also work.

Premium: This version is available with the $4.99 app and a $9.99 annual subscription. You receive quite a few additional features with the upgrade. You’re able to monitor multiple users from your one parental account. Each user can have a different level of filtering and a different device. You can customize the type of filtering that’s done. For example, you can add extra restrictions to a high school level account or remove some from the elementary school one.  You can create a blacklist – specific websites that you want blocked.  Or create a whitelist – websites you want to allow. This means that you can have social networking sites blocked but allow Facebook to come through. You’re able to receive reports detailing what your children have done online, which websites they visited and even better, which one’s they tried to visit but were blocked from. All this can be done online at www.mobicip.com. The user interface on the parental account is extremely straightforward and user friendly. Exactly what I needed. I haven’t the faintest idea how all the technical voodoo works to block/allow websites so I’m grateful they’ve kept the parental account features simple.

I was explaining how it all worked to my husband and he asked a valid question. He wanted to know why the kids wouldn’t just get around the restrictions by using Safari. So I told him what I’d do is hide Safari through the restrictions setting on the iPhone. That way the only way to access the internet would be through Mobicip. The icky possibilities of the internet are endless and if Santa manages to put an iPod Touch on his sleigh for my kids this will be one of the first apps that I install.

Price when Reviwed: $4.99

Seller: Mobicip,LLC