Griffin Kazoo MyPhones review

A smartphone or tablet is becoming an essential item for travelling with small children, with games and movies whiling away long car, train or even plane journeys and helping everyone arrive in a far better mood. However, that’s only the case if you, and other passengers, don’t have to suffer hours of toy Story, Peppa Pig or Angry Birds. Kids headphones are essential then and these Kazoo MyPhones from Griffin are the most fun designs we’ve seen.

Penguins proved a popular choice with our test subject

The headphones come in penguin and frog designs, our three-year old assistant always prefers a penguin, so that was an easy choice. There’s some nice details, such as the headphone jack being encased in a rubber fish, making it fun and easy to handle for small fingers. The cable is a good length too, so they don’t have to with their nose up against the iPad (though they will anyway).

The fish detail on the plug is a great touch

The headphones are designed to limit the volume to 85dB; that’s well below what a lot of people listen to their music at. This figure is the same as the one the EU floated a few years back as a safe limit for adults, though most players and devices can be overridden up 100dB if desired. It’s a good baseline for kids too then, but you’ll still need to judge for yourself what’s too loud. Our assistant never found the need to turn them up to full volume, even on a noisy train. This is partly because the cups are well padded to block out external noise.

In other respects the headphone are pretty basic. There’s no padding on the headband and basic clicky size adjustment – which should fit kids from three up to adult sizes (they fitted us even). The cord could be sturdier but we’ve used them for a number of months now without any problems. Sound quality is also basic, rather flat sounding, though we doubt most recipients will be much fussed about that.

At £16 these are fun and reasonably priced, they don’t feel particularly child proof unfortunately, but then we haven’t seen any that do. A good buy then, but we’re still waiting for someone to come along with a cheap, child-sized, Bluetooth set with a volume limiter.