Best Tablet For Kids | Amazon Fire Kids Edition Review
The Pros
Durable design with two-year accidental-damage protection; Robust parental controls; Tons of free, age-appropriate content; Long battery life; Bright screen
The Cons
Soft speakers; Weak cameras
Verdict
With its durable chassis, powerful parental controls and rich content library, the Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids Edition is the children's tablet to beat.
What is the edition of Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids?
The Fire HD 8 Kids Edition is larger than two Amazon tablets targeted at children. At heart, it's Fire HD 8 standard, but with a drop-proof rubber case and a free subscription a year for the Fire For Kids service, which provides access to rich content with kiddy.
Most recent customer reviews
on March 19, 2018
Color: PinkVerified Purchase
The parental controls did not work well for us. We set a minimum reading time -- supposedly you can set it up to require kids to read for a certain amount of time before they can start playing with apps or watching movies. This never worked as expected -- it seems there's a lot of content Amazon deems "educational" and lets it through as though it were reading. (A lot of these apps they let through are only marginally educational -- and we didn't want her playing games at all during her reading time!) We ended up turning Freetime off, since the content there was too simple (we had to set her a couple of age groups ahead to get material at her level -- and she's not advanced for her age) and generally low quality (her feed kept turning up lots of kid-level biographies of pop celebrities, for example).
Also, one of the main reasons we bought the Kindle was for travel, so she could watch movies on U.S. planes where they now show them only via wifi / device. However, even with the airline app installed, Kindles can't receive movies, at least on United. It worked fine on our iPads, but the Kindle couldn't access movies -- we kept getting error messages and the app FAQ implied that it was because the Kindle OS is too far behind.
Also, one of the main reasons we bought the Kindle was for travel, so she could watch movies on U.S. planes where they now show them only via wifi / device. However, even with the airline app installed, Kindles can't receive movies, at least on United. It worked fine on our iPads, but the Kindle couldn't access movies -- we kept getting error messages and the app FAQ implied that it was because the Kindle OS is too far behind.
