A Barbie-branded phone has been launched in the UK and Europe in a bid – its makers say – to help young people take a break from their smartphones.

It’s a very pink and fundamentally very simple device, with no front camera, only one game and very limited internet access.

Manufacturer HMD, which also makes phones for Nokia, says it is trying to respond to what it describes as an “increase” in people wanting a smaller “digital impact” on their lives.

However, others say it would be better to teach people how to use their devices in a healthier and more controlled way.

Parents and activists are increasingly calling for limits on the time children spend on smartphones or even banning the devices altogether.

Their concerns range from the suspicion that children will have shorter attention spans to the fear that they will be exposed to harmful or illegal content.

Some schools are taking action, perhaps most notably the UK’s most famous fee-paying school, Eton CollegeIt provides some of its students with “brick” phones – sometimes called feature phones – that can only send and receive text messages and calls.

The company says it wants to “balance the benefits and challenges that technology brings to schools.”

And this week mobile network EE joined the debate by advising parents not to let their children under the age of 11 use smartphones at all.

Lars Silberbauer, a senior manager at HMD, says his company is responding to these trends.

“We have seen that this boom that started in the US is also happening in Europe. More and more people don’t want to be digital all the time,” he said.

Some may be skeptical about how noble Mr. Silberbauer’s motives really are – and he admitted he would “love” to be able to integrate a messaging platform like WhatsApp into the Barbie phone.

But I’ve used it for a day and so far I can say it was definitely effective as a digital detox, given its very limited functionality.

It is a flip phone with a mirror front and has no app store or touch screen. I had no social media at all and the phone can’t receive anything more advanced than text messages.

That means no text messages with “read receipts” or the feature to see when someone is typing. That’s the default setting on many smartphones, so I didn’t get many text messages either.

Even with predictive text enabled, I found the number and letter keyboard much slower than a touchscreen keyboard and found myself calling more people than normal, which might not be such a bad thing.

And I discovered that you can only play the retro Nokia game Snake a limited number of times, even if it’s called Malibu Snake and pink.

But the device did attract a lot of attention, especially from girls and young women, when I walked around Glasgow city centre with it.

Of course, there is the danger that parents will not be bothered about a smartphone, but about a Barbie item. And that is perhaps just as undesirable.

The phone has an introductory price of £99 in the UK – double what you’d pay for a non-branded Nokia feature phone. There are plenty of other phones on the market that offer the same limited functionality but without any sort of big corporate tie-in.

“I imagine a lot of people would just buy it for fun, but the reality is that everyone is so reliant on their smartphone that it’s hard to keep it up for more than a day of detoxing,” says Ben Wood, a phone expert who has built his own museum of devices over the years.

Nevertheless, he says, there is a market for what are sometimes called “dumbphones”. His company, CCS Insight, estimates that about 400,000 will be sold in the UK this year.

“That’s an attractive niche for a company like HMD,” he says.

Some experts argue that getting rid of smartphones is not a real solution – after all, they are woven into our lives – and that children should instead be taught how to use them in a healthy and safe way.

“What we should be doing instead is thinking about how we can develop really good, really sustainable digital skills in that generation,” says Pete Etchells, professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University, who has written extensively on the issue of screen time.

“I think we can all use our phones in a healthier and more resilient way,” he said.

HMD is also working on a separate project, a new device it is designing with parents. It says more than 1,000 people have signed up to work on it so far.

And Mr. Silberbaum acknowledges that the final device could be something between a dumb phone and a smartphone.

“Do I want the smartphone with all the bells and whistles, or do I want something that can actually help me have a more considered approach to digital? That’s the choice we want to make,” he said.