Customer Reviews

Wherify G560 GPS Locator Phone

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This is a great idea, especially for kids. However, the company is selling the product before the wrinkles are smoothed out. You are supposed to be able to do a "locate" in 3 ways: from the web site, from your cell phone, or by calling Wherify. It was not clear to me until I bought the phone that the "locate" by sending a text message from a cell isn't a functional feature yet... the company told me it will be at least 2 months.

Locating from the web site has worked very poorly today. (They told me they are working on their technology but even the company can't get signed in today.)

Further, they only have customer support from 9 am until 7 pm. So, since you can't locate from your cell phone yet, you better have a working internet connection when you want to find your kids... because they won't answer the phone outside of those hours.

We also found that a fully-charged phone battery only lasted 7 hours, with the majority of that time on standby (actual talk time was about 5 min).

Great idea, but I expect by the time they have a good product the regular cell phone companies will be offering the same technology.

I am returning both of ours and getting out of the contract.

Although our older kids didn't get cell phones till much later, I gave in and got our younger one this phone for several reasons:
1. Stress reduction. I'm a sandwich generation person (I have kids, I have elderly parents) and so I need to know WHERE my kid is and how to reach him. Yes, we have rules and he follows them (call home, ALWAYS leave phone numbers where you'll be, etc) but this still leaves lots of room for error. What about when kids are playing outside or outside the range of a land line phone? With this phone, I can log online and know where he is quickly. It also works like a regular phone. The only risk is losing it.

2. Reasonable price. The Wherify Service will set you back about 20.00 a month but having a GPS phone is worth it for the peace of mind and time saved.

3. Too many hours driving around to track down my kid when he was outside, it was nearly dark, etc. It saves me time. If I DO need to reach him immediately, this device hones in on his location.

4. As noted above, I not only have elderly parents but I'm juggling responsibilities for two households (as so many Baby Boomers are). In short, I didn't get the phone so much because I thought HE needed one but because I really need to reach him when necessary - and quickly. It has paid off handsomely, both in time saved and less stress.

It is also sturdy, works well, no complaints. It doesn't look as "cool" as some state of the art phones but it does the job. You can stick it in your kid's backpack, put it in a teen's car, etc.

ONE CAUTION: If you are buying this to keep track of your employees or to snoop on your kids, think carefully about this. You might gain info at the cost of trust lost. I didn't buy this to snoop on my kid but to be able to reach him in an emergency.

I recently purchased this phone for my 5 year old daughter, I have her take it with her to pre-school and it is a good feeling when I can be on my computer at work and track my daughter in her school, on the school bus and when she arrives at my home. It becomes very addicting because it is so easy to get her location. Thank you Wherify for relieving a little stress from my life when parting with my daughter who means everything to me. Keep up the good work, the feature to locate using my cell phone will be awesome. Please get it soon!

We saw this on the View, and thought what a terrific produt for our son. Unfortunately, you can't reach the company to turn on the phone. All you get is a message that repeats at 8am or 5 pm, what a rip off! We returned to Amazon after spending a week calling them at all times of the day.

I bought the Wherifone three days ago and started messing with it. I was immediately amazed at how well it worked. The main feature is the GPS locator. You log on to the web site and put in a password to "locate" the unit. You can call a request in by telephone too, but I have not tried that yet, and probably won't. The first five or six times I sent a message out to "locate" the phone it came back dead-on. I mean it was within 20 feet each time. I did those hits from outside my office in Arizona as well as inside and around the building. The unit also has a cell phone feature. In my part of the country it uses Cingular and I must say the voice quality is much better than the quality on my regular cell phone.

On day two (yesterday) I continued to mess with it. I am considering getting these for my company to track my fleet of service vehicles but I thought I'd give it a good test first. On day two I let my teenage daughter use it when she went to college and drive around town. I used the "locate" feature about seven or eight more times and it worked fine. I knew where she was all day. (Unfortunately, she left it home when she went out last night!) I am very impressed with the wherifone.

I have continued to try it out today and I am very satisfied. In fairness, I have probably attempted 20 locates. Once (today) it told me that it was unable to locate and this was when the phone was outside. Then it worked fine again after that. There is no explanation for that, but overall, it worked about 95% of the time.

This is a very good product although it is probably better suited for use by kids than by my service fleet. The unit is pretty small and is designed for small hands. They need to some out with something larger for what I want to use it for.

My son received a Wherifone from his grandparents. However, when we called to activate the phone all of the company's phone lines listed in the package literature and on their web site were not in service or disconnected.

Sounds to me like they have gone belly up. We were very disappointed as we never even got a chance to use the device.

This phone was a real disappointment. We bought it so that we could find our child in the case of an emergency. The day that we actually needed to find our child, the gps showed him in another town 5 miles from our house!! He was in fact, 2 blocks away from our house. Second, the battery for the phone only held it's charge for a few hours (this is brand new out of the box). And third, it is extremely difficult to speak to someone in person at Wherify customer service. This has been a real waste of money.

Rip off - The service you are suppose to use with this phone is out of business. Then I checked with the major cell carriers and no one would/could service this phone. They were all happy to sell me their own version and their own plans but I now own a completely unusable phone.

Bought this phone months ago off amazon. Activated it. signed a one year contract. Could not get the locator service to work. After a zillion attempts to reach customer support i finally reached someone who said he would fix the issue. He called me back a couple times for info and finally said it was fixed (weeks later). But it still did not work. By now, I had the rep's cell phone number (sounds like they outsource their customer service) so I called him again and again until I reached him... he said that there was nothing more he could do as he no longer worked for wherify. However, he said that he talked to his supervisor and gave him my info. He also said that Wherify would forgive my contract, refund the money I already paid for the service (several months worth by now)and refund my money for the phone purchase--since it had been months and I could no longer return the phone to the seller. That was months ago and still, I have never heard from them. Their customer support lines are fake---no one ever answers, voice mail full. My emails to customer supports have never been answered. I have spent hunderds of dollars for NOTHING. I am having to dispute the charges to my credit card through my bank because they are still deducting money monthly.

I bought a Wherify locater phone about 3 yrs. ago. Now that I do not use the phone and want to cancel the monthly credit card billing, Customer Service is NON-EXISTENT! They do not answer emails at the toll-free number except that a recording is re-played: "This mailbox is full". Nothing wrong with their automatic billing, but once you are in, you can't get out!