It's on Fire! Detailed review of Amazon's Kindle Fire Kids' Tablet: It's not Perfect, but...

Amazon.com had their Kindle Fires on sale recently. Froot Loop has really been enjoying playing on his computer and my ipad, especially spelling games and videos about shapes and colors and letters and numbers. 

We decided to buy a Kindle Fire for Kids (Fire Kids) for him and Cocoa Puff. (they have to share!)

What was so appealing to me was that it has a two year, no questions asked warranty, which is GRAVY when you have young kids. It also came with a year of FreeTime, which I will write more about below. It comes with a kid proof case and a standard wall charger too. 

The Kindle Fire is a 7” tablet with both a front and rear camera. It has 16 GB of internal storage with a microSD slot so you can expand it up to 256 MB for videos, photos, and supported apps (Note that kindle books are NOT compatible with memory cards, and some apps don’t support them either… I will get to this point below as well). It does have unlimited cloud storage for Amazon content and photos as well. It has a fast quad-core processor that helps make loading apps and videos super quick. The battery life allows for up to 7 hours of use. It charges in about 6 hours with the included microUSB charger. 

The rear camera is 2MP and comes with software for kids to add borders and stickers. There’s also a front facing camera for video chatting, etc. 

Freetime prevents kids from posting or participating in social media. It also gives free access to thousands of selected apps, as well as in-app purchases for those selected apps. Supported apps have a banner across them that say “always free”. It also has free access to thousands of kid-friendly books, videos, and TV shows. There is quite a selection including Disney, PBS, Nickelodeon, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Star Wars, Scooby Doo, and many more. 

The kids profiles are kid friendly. Instead of the traditional layout that adults are used to, the kids profiles are organized by character or topic (i.e. alphabet, dogs, Spongebob, Thomas, etc.) They can only see the items they are allowed to see (permission given from the parent profile). There is a carousel of their recently used apps, games, videos, and books at the top for easy access.  

Each Kindle Fire can have up to four kids profiles, each custom tailored to each kid. Each profile can have its own time limits and goals and settings and access to apps/books/videos/etc. And kids profiles cannot purchase in-app items or access email or social media. It’s very easy for a parent to exit into a parent’s profile using a password. The parents profiles are where you create and edit settings and use whatever apps you wish. It is a fully functioning kindle fire tablet from the adult profiles. 

Amazon Freetime also allows you to set up educational goals. You can customize a child’s profile by setting a parameter that blocks non-educational/approved apps/games/etc. until a specific block of time has been spent reading, watching educational videos, or using educational apps. After these separate time slots have been filled, then children have access to all of their approved apps on their profile. There is also a bedtime setting that blocks access to that profile at specific times (i.e. 8 pm to 10 am on week days and 9pm to 9 am on weekends). You can also set a limit to how much total daily time is allowed on the tablet (i.e. 2 hours). After that limit is reached, that child’s profile is blocked by password for the rest of the day. 

Kids profiles also have the option for a limited web browser. Enabled, it allows children access to tens of thousands of YouTube videos and websites that are age appropriate. The allowed websites were hand-picked by a team from Amazon. 

The Fire Kids edition came in an orange box. In that box was the kid proof case and the regular Kindle Fire box. In the Kindle Fire box was the charging cord and tablet. I noticed that the charging cable is VERY short. Fortunately I have dozens of micro USB cables around here so I can use a longer one. There are no instructions and NO SCREEN PROTECTOR INCLUDED.
I put in our microSD card.

The kid proof case is a thick foam. It does seem to be well made for kids. It was very easy to put the Kindle Fire into the case. 
I turned on the tablet and went through the wifi connection screen. After this, it installed the necessary software for use. It took about 10-15 minutes. 

After this, it was time to set up the kids account. I enabled Amazon FreeTime and manually approved what content and apps I wanted to share with the kids profile. 

I set a lock screen pin and the daily goals and time limits. Then, I went to Amazon’s app store and added apps and books and videos. I launched the kids profile and loved how it was sorted by characters and ideas. Froot Loop can just look for his favorite characters and all the associated books, videos, games, and apps are right there together. This is brilliant. 

After I played around with his profile for a few, I swiped down to switch profiles over to mine. I went through another tutorial. The Home Page displays a list of installed apps. For recently used apps, you can just swipe left, which is convenient. To see notifications and frequently used settings, you swipe down from the top of the screen. 

The tablet is very easy to use. Froot Loop can use it but he gets impatient when he has to wait a few minutes for his desired content to download. 

My biggest complaints are as follows:

NO SCREEN PROTECTOR INCLUDED! Grrrr….

The charging cable is REALLY short. Like, ridiculously short. There’s no way to use it while it’s charging at all. 
The external SD card does not support any of the kindle books. This is annoying to me because that was the main purpose of getting the Kindle Fire. There’s ways around it, but it’s not really a good idea because you do not have the functionality of the Kindle, i.e. you cannot save your place and then you have to open through ES Explorer or whatever and that’s more trouble than it’s worth. Lots of apps also aren’t compatible with the SD cards, so they have to get saved to the internal storage as well. However, videos, photos, and supported apps can be installed directly to the SD card through settings. I recommend this. 

When your internal storage is almost full, the KindleFire freaks out and turns off your wifi. This is incredibly annoying, but there’s no way around it. Plus, this keeps your kids from completely filling the device, so I guess it’s a necessary safeguard. You have to go into settings, enter your password, and look at your internal storage. You can automatically archive content that has not been used recently or frequently just with a single click. This is a nice feature and a super quick way to get the wifi back. The items that are archived are still available in your cloud storage. 

All that said, I love this tablet. I accidentally spent two hours playing a stupid claw game during Cocoa Puff’s naptime. I love FreeTime. I was able to purchase additional credits for free and keep playing my stupid game without actually spending any additional money. It was a great waste of time. I think Froot Loop is going to have a blast with it. He has already listened to several books being read to him. The thing to remember is that while technology is wonderful and necessary, you still have to find the balance between technology and the “real world.” I appreciate how the Kindle Fire for Kids makes that pretty easy with easy to control settings. Once Froot Loop is out of minutes for the day, he’s got to play with something else. I’m actually not too worried about that with him yet because he’d much rather play outside or build with his blocks than sit still and watch something for more than a few minutes a day, but as he gets older, I’m sure this could change. It is so incredibly easy to change his settings as he grows up. 

Do you allow screentime?