Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Princess phones are usually described as cute and retro. Maybe the target market is people who miss the 1960s or who wish they'd lived then. But there's another, even more important, market for this type of phone: people with dementia. My 84-year-old mom is in the middle stages of an Alzheimer's-like dementia. Recently she moved into assisted living, and she had to provide her own phone. Cell phones have way too many (and too tiny) buttons for people with cognitive challenges. Regular phones also have unnecessary buttons, and many models have integral answering systems, which are mysterious and unusable for people like my mom. Cordless phones, like cell phones, also have the disadvantage of being easily misplaced and forgotten. So a corded phone with minimal buttons is the way to go. Picture phones, on which each button has a photo of a loved one, instead of a number, sounded good to me till I read reviews saying these phones make it too easy for the caller to dial the same person repeatedly all day long. I wanted Mom to have a basic, simple, old-style phone that required punching in the numbers, but that had no other options on it. Also Mom loves pink. So I bought this phone. It's perfect: a short cord, a minimum of buttons, nothing confusing anywhere on it, it rings loudly, and it's pink. Someday Mom won't be able to push the buttons and make calls, but by that time she may not know what a phone is anyway. Tragically, that's the reality of dementia. But meanwhile, this is the ideal phone for her. I recommend that people who need to buy a phone for a senior with mid-stage dementia seriously consider this little princess phone.