Considering buying a Kindle Fire Kids Edition tablet for my daughter

Tek7

CGA President, Tribe of Judah Founder & President
Staff member
I bought my daughter a generic Android tablet about 8 months ago and, well, it's not great. I'm just so tired of dealing with wi-fi connection drops and a battery that won't even hold a charge while idle overnight.

Amazon has the Fire Kids Edition tablet for $80 for the 8GB model right now and I'm strongly considering buying it and chalking the generic tablet purchase up as a well-intentioned but ultimately failed experiment.

Have any of you purchased a Fire Kids Edition tablet for your own children?

If so, would you mind sharing your thoughts on the tablet and tell me whether you'd recommend it or not?

On a related note, how troublesome is sideloading and updating apps not found on the Amazon app store? That's what turned me away from the Fire Kids Edition last year.
 
It is OK, the warranty is nice for sure, no worries about her scratching it and no need for screen protectors. It is fun enough but my 5 year old keeps wanting to use my older iPad or the older kid's iPad minis. Get a large SD card because without it you are CONSTANTLY managing the internal space. Oddest thing is that WiFi actually stops working when the internal space is full. The sideloading is workable, but not for everything. (certain games are simply not supported)

If I had to do it again, I would not have bought it and gone with an iPad mini2 or something similar in price. Then again, we are heavy into the Apple library so all the good games and apps are purchased on the platform and my 5 year old is left out with the only Android in the house.
 
Not sure about kids edition, but I have been using a Fire for 2.5 years now and have had no issues. Yes it is a tablet so battery life isn't measured in days, but I can get active use of about 8 hrs, depending on what I am doing. I haven't tried it with a full length video yet. I have used it recently a lot on public wi-fi hotspots and had no problem with dropouts. Being used to a real keyboard it is a little awkward for me, but doable. I don't know too much on the apps but I loaded a security app, and load books from Project Gutenberg.org with no problems. Just remember it is designed to hook into the Amazon ecology and does that very well indeed. I would be interested in the differences in the software for the kids edition. There are a couple of good books out there that can take you through different processes step by step, I use Kindle Fire HDX Guide.
 
Not sure about kids edition, but I have been using a Fire for 2.5 years now and have had no issues. Yes it is a tablet so battery life isn't measured in days, but I can get active use of about 8 hrs, depending on what I am doing. I haven't tried it with a full length video yet. I have used it recently a lot on public wi-fi hotspots and had no problem with dropouts. Being used to a real keyboard it is a little awkward for me, but doable. I don't know too much on the apps but I loaded a security app, and load books from Project Gutenberg.org with no problems. Just remember it is designed to hook into the Amazon ecology and does that very well indeed. I would be interested in the differences in the software for the kids edition. There are a couple of good books out there that can take you through different processes step by step, I use Kindle Fire HDX Guide.

If you don't have the kid's edition, this review is only relevant to using it with the Parent profile. The kid's profile is a completely different beast.
 
We got one for each of our 4 kids, aged 3 to 11, this last Christmas, and they all enjoy it. The warranty is really nice to have, but we haven't had an issue yet. Our older kids (9 and 11) have "adult" accounts as well as kids accounts, so they have more free reign of stuff to do, though everything is monitored, and they only get them an hour or two a day. I got Google stuff installed fairly easy, though you do have to root it. It doesn't come with any Google apps (Gmail, play store, even the account management stuff) but its pretty easy to load, if you can follow directions.

I will second the extra storage. Also make sure that you set apps to auto load to the SD card. I didn't at first, and it's a pain to move everything. The wifi does shutdown if it's too full, which sucks, but leads me to my next point. If you are using the Freetime (amazing actually. Everything is free as long as you keep the subscription) exclusively, you will always need wifi to work. That was a huge bummer, since we got them thinking of long car rides.

Overall though, we are happy with them. :) Hope that helped a little. :)
 
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