You've obviously never given a toddler a cellphone to play a video. They'll find a way to do it, so you have to watch them like a hawk. For older kids, this is less of a problem.
On the other hand, they can use the AppleTV remote quite easily without much worry. So, the lack of a viable (dedicated) remote for the Chromecast is an issue for some.
For us, I have an AppleTV in the living room that the kids can use, but a Chromecast in the bedroom that only my wife and I use. Although, I have had a problem before where my 3 year old figured out how to tell Netflix on an iPad to play a movie to our Chromecast. She had no idea why her movie wouldn't play and got very frustrated!
> They'll find a way to do it, so you have to watch them like a hawk.
I'm curious why this wasn't really a problem when we had landlines in our houses. Is it just because these devices are a lot more fun to play with than phones were and the kid eventually dials 911 accidentally?
No, it's because there's usually an emergency call button of some kind (so the towers can route your call based on location, iirc), you're not actually entering the sequence "911". No touchtone phone I've seen has a big red "911" autodial button.
Also, the devices are used for entertainment, even if you did give a toddler a touchtone phone as a toy, you'd disconnect it from the line.
The emergency call button brings up a standard dialer keypad. It does not dial 911 for you. It would be crazy if it did, since emergency numbers vary wildly by locale.
Here in the UK, our emergency number is 999. Or you can dial 112, as that's the European standard, and we'd be daft not to implement it even if we hadn't agreed to do so. Alternatively, try dialling 911, which I understand also works and which was introduced to help children who grew up with US TV.
In any case, the phone won't actually dial the number even if you do type it in -- if you dial what it thinks is an emergency number, it initiates the emergency call setup, which is what lets you dial without a SIM and on a different providers' network. So a dedicated button is all that's required.
This does mean that there's a possibility that my phone and the PSTN disagree over what constitutes an emergency network, but as the phone gets its numbers from the SIM, which comes from my provider, which is regulated by the same people as make the rules for the PSTN, it seems likely that all the options will work.
Should be possible to do a custom build without support for the phone part. I've never tried this, but based on the fact that some early Cynaogen ports (As far as I can recall) didn't support dialling via the phone, it should be possible to create a build without the drivers/blobs for enabling the phone part?
