Circle Media - Circle with Disney - White

I got the Circle as soon as it was available at Best Buy, rather than online. It set up easily. It takes a while to figure out some of the IP addresses for devises, finding the right time limit settings and filters, but overall we (the parents) love it! The kids do NOT like it one bit, since the Circle is doing exactly what it's supposed to do- block apps and turn them off after they hit the time limit.

Circle has simplified managing the time our kids spend online. It's simple enough to configure that my non-techie wife finds it easy to regulate, limit, filter, and pause our kid's Internet access. It's simple log shows who is accessing the Internet and when. Easy setup and no special connections. (We just set it up high on a shelf so the kids can't see it.).

This item meets and exceeds my expectation of protecting children from accessing undesired material on electronic devices.

The circle does what it says it does. The only complaint is that sometimes it seems to loose connection.

This is working fairly well so far. It is basically setting up filtering based on the MAC address of each device that touches your network. As a result, this filters or restricts per device not per person. Therefore, I cannot set up settings for my iPad for my 8 year old daughter that are different from my 4 year old son since they share the device. I can only set up restrictions for the device as a whole. This made me reconsider the settings for many of my devices, especially my shared devices. As another example, I can keep the internet from being accessible on my Apple TV to prevent the kids form turning on Netflix at 6am. However, if I turn off the internet at night too early, then my wife and I cannot watch Netflix. I also cannot restrict Netflix content on the Apple TV through the Circle b/c I will be restricted as well. Another surprise was that I have a lot more MAC Addresses touching my network then I thought. Many of them are cryptic and I have no idea what they are. I'll figure it out eventually. In short, this is going to set up restrictions on DEVICES, not people. It does this very well in an easy to use interface and I recommend it.

I set this up for my 9 year old son. It was very simple to do. It works well for filtering most things. The alerts also work as advertised. Only negative so far is that the time calculations can be misleading. If the phone updates apps or does other Things in the background, it counts this as time that he was online.

This device takes a lot of the Wi-fI and content protections you can laboriously put together using your ISP's router settings, and adds to it. It is fairly simple to set up, and does not require any additional monthly fees (unless you set up the protections on your kids cellphones). It helps block content with different setting levels, blocks specific websites, and can help monitor time usage. You can pair this with the Mothershp app to create a Chore to Reward system.

For context, I'm the parent of a 13-yr-old with a cell phone and a 9-yr-old without. We purchased the Circle based on reviews after trying to reign in our kids' internet access through software, router, and ISP solutions. None offered the flexibility, access, and reporting we were looking for. The Circle comes the closest to our idea of a perfect solution, and it is priced below other less-featured solutions. The major features that attracted us to the Circle were the ease of access using the iOS app, the kid-proof-ness of the design, the fact that it works with the router we already bought to do this (for 3x the Circle price), and the ability to set up multiple groups with multiple on/off times each day. Being able to put each kid's personal devices into their own group allows us to switch off the younger child's access for an earlier bedtime without affecting the older one. We also have separate groups for family-wide devices like the primary homework computer - these get different schedules for accessing entertainment vs educational websites. The ability to also exclude devices like our security cameras and thermostat from the user pool is helpful for when anarchy breaks out and we have to lock everything else down until the tantrums end (you other parents know what I'm talking about). While it's not perfect (the interface can be clunky at times, and you can't undo a reward given to a child, for example) the overall experience is leaps and bounds above anything else we've tried. Improvements are always coming, and connections to multiple additional apps have been promised. It's great as-is, and hopefully it will just get better. Note: We have not yet tried the paid service that controls devices on a mobile network, but it is supposedly an extension of the included home wifi service.