Author: Julie Campbell

These applications allow parents to see how their kids are using their devices, and can even remotely shut them off.

In South Korea, mobile apps that allow parents to be able to monitor their children have been growing in popularity and one in particular, “Smart Sheriff” has been standing out among the rest as it provides parents with the ability to watch their child’s smartphone activity, shut down applications, or turn off the entire device.

This app was created with funding from the South Korean government in order to let parents block pornography.

This app was meant to give parents control over the offensive content that their kids will be able to view online. That said, the features expand well beyond that and parents have taken notice. Smart Sheriff is one of at least 15 mobile apps that are available in that market to let parents monitor the smartphone use of their kids.

They reveal how long the mobile devices are being used, how often apps are being used, and which websites are accessed. Some of these applications will even tell parents where a child is located using the device GPS. In fact, some apps will send an alert to parents if certain specific keywords are searched for, such as “suicide”, “bully”, or “pregnancy”. An alert may also be sent if the child sends or receives a message that contain those terms.

So far, these mobile apps have been downloaded nearly half a million times (about 480,000) in South Korea.

These app download stats are only likely to rise. The Korea Communications Commission in the country decided, last month, that telecom companies and parents will be required to install Smart Sheriff or another one of these monitoring apps on the smartphones of anyone under the age of 18 years. The commission is the regulator for the entire telecommunications industry in the country.

This requirement will not apply to old smartphones that are already carried by people under the age of 18, but the majority of schools have sent out letters to parents, regardless, encouraging them to obtain and install this type of mobile apps to help to keep their kids safe.

Analysts have been posting speculations about possible designs, some of which include this luxury option.

According to some of the latest reports about the next version of the Apple smartphone (which is predicted to be called the iPhone 6S), such as those from Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst from KGI Securities, one of the versions that will be available will include a model with a luxury rose gold finish.

This particular speculation is being taken very seriously as Ming-Chi Kuo has a considerable track record.

That track record has included a long list of correct speculations that have been released before the official announcements from Apple. For this reason, when trying to guess at what the iPhone 6S will involve, many people have turned their sights to what that analyst has to say. Recently, the analyst released information about the potential rose gold option of that generation of the Apple smartphone. It also described the addition of Force Touch as well as an upgrade to the camera.

It may also be that the iPhone 6S will be improved in order to provide enhanced call quality.

This may come in the form of an additional microphone that will be built into the smartphone technology. It was also suggested that the larger version of the smartphone, the Plus, will have a next generation that will have sapphire screens in order to improve the scratch resistance of the device. That said, the analyst claimed that the device would still be required to be able to overcome the current challenges associated with the drop test before that version of the screen would be approved for production for the next iPhone 6 Plus generation.

The camera identified by Kuo will be capable of 12 megapixels. That prediction also makes a lot of sense, when taking into consideration that a couple of generations of the smartphones have already been holding at the 8 megapixel level (although it should be noted that other types of improvements, such as the pixel size on the sensors, have been improved).

As displays become ever more dense and higher in resolution, changing to a camera sensor that is also higher in resolution could be an important benefit for the iPhone 6S.